


There's a Hell of a Universe Next Door

by lustmordred



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe, Dubious Consent, M/M, Mental Illness, Mental Instability, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-30
Updated: 2013-07-30
Packaged: 2017-12-21 21:42:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/905265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lustmordred/pseuds/lustmordred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a big difference between dying and never being born.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this about a week after 5.13 _The Song Remains the Same_ aired. The plot is hugely inspired by what I was thinking after watching this episode. I don't know if it would be a good idea to brush up on that episode or watch it or whatever before reading this or not. I guess it couldn't really hurt. The title comes from a line in a poem by e.e. cummings: "Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."

Things don‘t have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

_Grant Morrison_

 

The watercolor painting on the wall looked a lot like something he saw once in a book about Hitler. That’s what Dean was thinking when Dr. Maya Fraus, his therapist with the horn-rim glasses and the really hot legs, raised her voice to get his attention. 

“ _Dean_.”

Dean blinked and shifted his gaze to her. “Huh?”

“You were telling me about your dream,” Dr. Fraus said. She lifted her brows at him and gestured with her hand for him to continue. 

Dean’s eyes followed her hand as she put it back in her lap. Long, slender, pretty hands, French manicure with a ball-point pen from Citi Bank held easily between the first and second finger. She was left handed and she didn’t wear a ring. He wondered for a second why he had suddenly noticed such a thing.

“My dream,” Dean repeated. 

Dr. Fraus leaned a little forward and snapped her fingers in front of his nose. 

“Hey,” Dean said, and jerked back from her warily. “What the hell?”

“Mr. Winchester, this is your hour on your dime, but I believe we’re making some progress here. Focus for me, please,” Dr. Fraus said. 

She sat back and Dean relaxed. “I told you, it’s just another one of those weird dreams.”

“And you’re someone else?” she said, encouraging him to go on. 

“Yes,” Dean said. “I mean _no_. That’s part of what makes them so weird. I’m _not_ someone else, I’m just… I’m different.” He sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “ _Everything_ is different.”

“How so?” Dr. Fraus asked. 

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Dean said. He chewed on his bottom lip and stared down at his hands in his lap. “I’m… I don’t work at the shop. I don’t really know what I do… I’m always looking for something and running from something. There’s… There are other… There’s…”

Dr. Fraus cut him off before he really got worked up and started to stammer. “What about your family? Are they different?”

“Yes,” Dean said. 

“What do you mean?” Dr. Fraus asked. 

“I don’t know,” Dean said, making a frustrated sound in his throat. “They aren’t there. My mom and dad aren’t. But there’s this other guy and I don’t know who he is, but I… I already told you about that.”

Dr. Fraus made a soft sound of agreement and tapped her pen against the side of her notebook. “Where are your parents in these dreams, Dean?”

“I don’t know,” Dean said. 

“Alright,” she said. “Where do you _think_ they are?”

“I don’t know,” Dean said again. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I think maybe they’re dead.”

“Why would you think that?” Dr. Fraus asked. 

Dean huffed out a breath and gave her an exasperated look. “I don’t _know_ ,” he said. “It’s just this feeling I get when I have them. They’re just dreams anyway, it’s not like it matters. My parents are fine.”

“What about Adam?” Dr. Fraus said. 

Dean frowned and turned his head, looking away from her. “What about him?” he said. 

“Is he the same or different in these dreams?”

Dean’s frown deepened. “He’s not there either. But I think that’s different too.”

“How is it different?” she asked. 

“I don’t think he’s dead,” Dean said. “He’s just not there.”

“Dean, do you know why you have these strong negative feelings for your brother?” Dr. Fraus asked him. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked him that question, either. Adam was always part of these visits. 

“No,” Dean said. 

“But you do?” Dr. Fraus prodded. 

“What kind of stupid question is that?” Dean snapped, glaring at her. 

“An important one, I think,” Dr. Fraus said calmly. When Dean didn’t reply to that, she glanced down at her notebook and wrote something. “Have you been taking your medication?”

“You mean those happy pills you prescribed for me?” Dean said. “Yeah, I’m taking them. They don’t make me happy, just so you know.”

Dr. Fraus gave him one of _those_ looks over her glasses and Dean slumped in his chair and shut up. He hated that look. His mother was the queen of that look and it always made him feel like he was about three years old and had just pissed the bed again. 

“Haven’t done that since I was five,” Dean mumbled to himself. 

“Excuse me?” Dr. Fraus said.

“Nothing,” Dean said. 

“I see,” she said. 

Dean chuffed out a little laugh. “Sure you do,” he said. 

Dr. Fraus didn’t respond to that, just sat there with her pretty hands folded over her notebook in her lap. 

Dean shifted uneasily under her gaze and made himself not shout at her for staring at him. That was something crazy people did. Apparently sane people didn’t give a shit if you were rude. “You don’t _see_ ,” he said after a minute, not meeting her eyes. “Nobody gets it, but especially not _you_.”

“Why especially not me, Dean?” Dr. Fraus asked. 

Dean laughed softly and finally did look at her, a quick glance, then away, but he was proud of himself because she was still staring. “Because you think I’m crazy,” he said. “I could tell you I fantasize about giving blowjobs to panda bears and you’d just ask me more questions. You don’t _believe me_.”

“Do you?” Dr. Fraus said. “Fantasize about panda bears?”

Dean blinked and looked at her again, this time his eyes lingered for a moment before he smiled faintly and looked away. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said. 

She sighed and reached over to put her notebook aside on her desk. “I think you’re trying to avoid the subject,” she said. 

“What subject would that be, Doc?” Dean asked. 

“The one you really want to talk about,” Dr. Fraus said. “The man in your dreams.”

Dean fidgeted and rubbed his arm. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. 

“I think you do,” Dr. Fraus said. 

“It’s not _real_ ,” Dean said, hissing it at her as he pinned her with his eyes for a moment. “Everything _always_ feels wrong. There’s… it’s not right. It’s never been right.”

“But this man makes that feeling go away?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” Dean said. “How fucked up is that? I mean you always hear that phrase, ‘the man of my dreams.’ This time it’s for real--kinda--and it… it sucks.”

“In your dreams, what kind of relationship do you have with this man?” Dr. Fraus asked. 

Dean scratched the back of his hand. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’re… we’re always together. We…”

“Are you lovers?” she asked. 

“What?” Dean said. “ _No_. It’s not like that.”

“Are you sure?” Dr. Fraus asked. 

No, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t even know the man’s name, just what he looked like, what he sounded like, and yeah, what he smelled like. _What he smelled like_. You didn’t know things like that about anyone unless there was something more going on there. 

“I think maybe he’s my brother,” Dean said. He swallowed and shifted in his chair again, unconsciously inching away from Dr. Fraus. “My real brother.”

“Because Adam isn’t your real brother?”

“Adam doesn’t _belong_ ,” Dean said, glaring at her. She was always asking him the same stupid questions and always, _always_ this shit with Adam. “Adam is _wrong_.”

“Adam is your little brother, Dean,” Dr. Fraus said. “Why doesn’t he belong?”

“Because he doesn’t,” Dean said. “I want a cigarette.”

“I’m sorry, there’s no smoking anywhere in this building,” Dr. Fraus said. “So Adam doesn’t belong, but this stranger in your dream, you think he does?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Dean said, frustrated and becoming upset. “I feel better when I’m with him. I feel _normal_. Not now normal like you think is normal, but _right_ normal. And even if the world is ending, that hole where the wind blows isn’t there anymore so it’s _fine_.”

Dr. Fraus frowned at him and tilted her head a little. “This is the first time you’ve mentioned the world ending,” she said slowly. “Why do you think the world is ending, Dean?”

Dean grumbled under his breath and shrugged. 

“Excuse me?” Dr. Fraus said. 

“I don’t think the world is ending, don’t be stupid,” Dean said. He rubbed his forehead. 

“Then why would you say something like that?” she asked. 

“I don’t know,” Dean said. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t _know_. I’m tired.”

“Alright,” Dr. Fraus said. 

“I want to go home,” Dean said. “I’m done talking. I want to leave.”

“Alright, just let me get you something real quick,” she said and got up to go around her desk. She pulled out a tablet and started to write quickly on it. 

“You’re gonna make me take more pills,” Dean said morosely. “Why? What did I do?”

Dr. Fraus stopped writing and looked up at him over her desk. “Dean, this isn’t to punish you, this is to _help_ you,” she said. “You do understand that I’m here to help you, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Dean mumbled. He liked the doctor a lot, but he didn’t want to take more medication. It made him feel weird and sometimes he didn’t dream, which upset him more than anything because the dreams were the only place he ever went that didn’t confuse and scare him. Which was pretty weird because there were a lot of monsters in his dreams.

“Good,” Dr. Fraus said. She ripped off the paper and held it out for Dean to take. 

Dean got up and went over to get it from her. He didn’t read it, just folded it and held it in his hand. “Okay,” he said inanely. 

“Okay,” Dr. Fraus said. She smiled at him, trying to reassure him. “I’ll see you next Thursday.”

“Okay,” Dean said again. 

He left the office and stuffed the prescription into his pocket. He’d just give it to his mother when he got home, it didn’t matter what it was. He didn’t want to know anyway.

~~*~~

Dean had Thursdays and Fridays off from work. Thursday because he had to go see Dr. Fraus and Friday, he guessed, because his parents thought he needed a little time to recover from going to see Dr. Fraus. This wasn’t always true, but sometimes it was. It was true enough of the time that Dean was really glad sometimes that he lived at home and worked for his dad. 

He rode the bus downtown after he got out of his session with the doctor. He had thirty bucks in his pocket, which wasn’t enough to take a cab and he didn’t want to call his mother to come get him yet because he really just didn’t want to be at home right now. So he walked around, looking in the shops and listening to the street musicians--buskers; he’d heard them called that. It had been in some little coffee shop that catered to college kids that hung around there all day when they weren’t in class, eating scones, drinking green tea and talking about how James Joyce or whoever was such a bad writer. 

Dean thought college kids were pretty stupid and fake most of the time, but he’d looked the word ‘busk’ up and that’s what it meant.

He gave five dollars to a girl in torn jeans and a Patti Smith t-shirt who sang like Janis Joplin, but couldn’t play her ratty guitar for shit. It didn’t matter, he liked her and when he dropped the money in her case, she smiled at him and went from plain to pretty in a moment. 

Feeling a little better, Dean went into a diner and ordered a cheeseburger. The diner was called Dinky’s, which had always amused him, but they didn’t mind if he smoked as long as it wasn’t a day when they were getting inspected and he closed the Venetian blinds over his window. That was fine with Dean, he didn’t like people walking by staring in at him anyway and he always took the booth seat in the far back corner where he could _watch_. Besides, Dinky made killer cheeseburgers and he never skimped on the onions or tried to cheat him out of his fries. 

When the waitress, Jolene, brought Dean his food, she smiled at him and he smiled back. She lingered a little bit by his table and he watched her, waiting until she left to begin eating. He didn’t like eating with strange people watching him, and maybe Jolene wasn’t really a _stranger_ because he knew that next Wednesday was her 21 st birthday and she had a cat named Oscar with one ear and Dinky was her dad, except his real name wasn’t Dinky, it was Herman. But she wasn’t his friend either, not really, even if she did like him and sometimes gave him his soda for free. He still couldn’t eat with her watching him. And she _would_ watch him because she was weird like that; she was one of _those_. Not rude about it, but still just staring at him and she was even worse because he knew her a little bit, so she thought it was okay to touch him. 

_Casual_ touching, that’s what Dr. Fraus said it was, and she also said it was okay and normal, but Dean didn’t think so. Dean was pretty sure Dr. Fraus was way off on that one because nothing normal was supposed to feel that uncomfortable. Nothing normal was supposed to make your skin feel like it was standing up by itself and thinking about dancing away. No, that was decidedly _ab_ normal.

Still, Dean had never yelled at Jolene about it because she was pretty and she was always nice to him, even if he was having a Bad Day and was acting strange. 

But this time when Jolene came back to take his plate and give him the check, Dean was the one staring. He wasn’t staring like Jolene stared though, like she wanted to do more than maybe just normally and casually touch him, but like she was some kind of freak because that’s what she _was_. Her face was all twisted like the face of a soft clay sculpture that God had reached down and sunk his fingers into, then scrambled all around because maybe he just wasn’t happy with his work. Which was a thought that Dr. Fraus would have undoubtedly classified as eccentric or something similar because saying the word ‘crazy,’ even when no other word really fit, was a no-no. 

Eccentric or not, Jolene still had a monster’s twisted face as she gave him the check and picked up his dishes. She smiled at him and she did it with her deformed lips so that the only way he knew it was a smile was because she _always_ smiled at him and her lips had moved a little bit. Dean watched her, horrified, and tried not scream or flinch or act as _crazy_ as he really was because he didn’t know what was going on but he didn’t think Jolene would appreciate him yelling at her and calling her a demon. Even if she was. _Especially_ if she was. 

“Have a great day, honey,” Jolene said to him as she took his dirty dishes away. 

“Uh… yeah,” Dean said. “Yeah… you too. Thanks… Um. Thank you.“ He swallowed and tried not to be too obviously freaked out. He must have done an okay job of it because Jolene didn’t even ask him if he was okay, just smiled her ghastly smile at him again and took his dishes into the back. 

When she was gone, he eased cautiously out of the booth and dug in his pocket for his money while keeping an eye on the swinging door that led into the back where the kitchen was. He got the twenty out and tossed it on the table, then bolted. He didn’t even care that the food hadn’t been over ten bucks. His was scared and if he had to look into Jolene’s face again and see her pretty blue eyes staring hungrily out of that horrible, twisted mask of features he was going to lose it right there. He hadn’t had a good fit in public in about five years, but something like _that_? Shit, how could anyone blame him?

They couldn’t, he assured himself as he power-walked to the nearest bus stop. “Nothing wrong with _me_ ,” he muttered. “Not this time. Not gonna tell the doc about this, though, nuh-uh. She’ll do something like put me in a _ward_. In the hospital. Don’t want to be in the fucking hospital with _crazy people_.”

“Hey, buddy, that’s true shit,” said a guy in dirty clothes leaning against a newspaper dispenser. “You got some change?”

“Why, you offering to give me some?” Dean snapped, and kept walking. He stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and hunched his shoulders in as the dirty homeless guy shouted at him and called him an asshole. 

“Fuck you,” Dean mumbled. “Fuck you, fuck you, _fuck you_!” He screamed the last back at the guy as he got on the bus.

The bus driver blinked at him, a little startled but not by all that much. Bus drivers were used to that kind of thing more than most people thought because most crazy people didn’t drive, they ended up on public transportation. 

Dean went all the way to the back of the bus and sat down in the corner, huddled in on himself, watchful. He kept his eyes on the other passengers as the bus took off, only glancing every once in a while out the windows to check where they were at. 

He watched a woman surreptitiously breastfeeding a baby that looked like an orange-haired troll doll under her oversized sweater. It made the woman uncomfortable--he could tell because she kept looking at him like he was going to notice that and remember his manners--but Dean was a little fascinated with how disgusting it all was, so he kept watching until she got up and moved. 

When Dean got home, he went inside and stuck the prescription Dr. Fraus had given him to the refrigerator with a smiley face magnet. He picked the biggest, brightest refrigerator magnet so his mother wouldn’t miss the prescription when she went to make dinner or get a glass of water or answer the phone. He always picked the brightest magnet and last month it had gone under two Carebear magnets, but his mother had gone to a yard sale last week and found the ugly smiley face, so this week it was the smiley face because even if it wasn’t as bright as the red Carebear, it was way more obnoxious. 

On his way up to his room, he listened to hear if anyone else was home. The T.V. if his father was home, which he wasn’t because he worked Thursdays and Fridays and took the weekend off unless something happened with Dean at the shop and he had to go in. If his mother was home, it would be the radio on low. Maybe “Hey Jude” or Jefferson Airplane playing “Somebody to Love” just high enough that when she sang along with it, her voice carried without the music most of the time. If his dad was home and the radio was on, if he wasn’t outside, it would be AC/DC or Motorhead and it wouldn’t be on low at all. 

No one was home, though. The house was quiet. 

Dean rushed up the stairs and into his room, where he locked the door before crawling into his bed and pulling the covers over his head. He lay there like that for a few minutes, breathing and listening to the sound of his heart, the way it beat in a muffled way like it was padded with cotton because the blanket kept in the sound. After he got his breathing and his first bout of panic under control, he sat back up. 

The room was bright and sunny, which was wrong. It meant his mother had been in there to air it out and she’d opened all the blinds and curtains and all the _windows_. Agitated by the very idea, Dean got up and went around the room closing everything back up tight until everything was gloomy and cool dark again. He could see because some little light came in around the top of and bottom of the curtains, but none of the light was direct and right now, he really didn’t want any light. He wanted to _hide_.

“Crazy talk,” Dean whispered to himself as he started to undress. “Just like going to bed at three in the afternoon is crazy. Crazy-crazy. Not just eccentric behavior huh, Doc? Nope, it’s crazy.”

Dean smirked to himself and crawled back into the bed in his boxers, wrapping up in the blankets and sheets like a moth in a cocoon, just his nose and mouth uncovered to breathe. He wanted to sleep, thought of sleep with _longing_ , and closed his eyes. In sleep, he felt safe. He was okay there. He wasn’t scared. He didn’t know why because there were monsters a thousand times worse than the claymation Picasso that Jolene had turned into at the diner trying to _kill him_ in his sleep, but it didn’t matter. It was okay. He thought maybe in his dreams, he knew how to take care of that, so he wasn’t scared because _they_ were the ones that were scared. Dean really liked that idea. He liked the idea that for once, he wasn’t the scared one, _they_ were. 

And then there was the man who lived nowhere else but there in his sleeping brain. Curled up in his crazy wiring, that was where he lived and that was the _only_ place. So Dean lay there, wound up in blankets, counting backwards from a thousand, trying to get there. Trying to get to that place, that time, that person. He wanted to go _home_ , which was another crazy thought, but it felt right too. It felt right in the way Adam felt so wrong and the strange dream man felt perfectly right. He wanted to sleep so he could go home.

~~*~~

Dean opened his eyes and everything was brighter and sharper. Everything was more quiet in his head, which was strange in its way because when he closed his eyes here, there were nightmares in his vision on the backs of his eyelids. In this world, he dreamed of torture and fire, the smell of sulfur burning the tender inside of his nostrils while he screamed and demons laughed. But it was still quieter here.

“Dean?”

Dean’s eyes snapped open and fixed on the man across the table. He was sitting at a table in a bar. He had a beer in front of him that was almost finished and the glass was sweating condensation into a napkin with a phone number on one corner. 

Under his hand, there was a symbol carved into the wood tabletop. Dean looked down at it and traced it with his finger, a pang of recognition that he couldn’t place worrying at his mind. 

“ _Dean_?”

“Huh?” Dean said, his head coming up again. 

“Dude, where were you at just now?” the man asked. 

Dean narrowed his eyes on him, studying him intently. He was tall, _very_ tall, but not imposing about it. He was tanned and attractive under hair that was shaggy in a way that wanted to be long. In the dim light of the bar, Dean wasn’t sure, but his eyes looked green-ish. Not green like his own, but darker. 

There was such a swelling sense of recognition at the sight of him that it was a little disturbing. Dean put out his hand to touch him and ended up sliding his fingers down his cheek as his eyes went wide in surprise. 

“Dean, what are you doing?” he said, voice a hissing whisper. His gaze darted around the bar before settling back on Dean’s face. He didn’t look afraid, but he did look startled and really puzzled. 

Dean snatched his hand back and grabbed his beer. “Nothing,” he said, drinking. “Sorry.”

“Hey, forget it,” the guy said. “It’s not a big deal, we’re just… We’re supposed to be keeping an eye out. Wrong place, bad timing, that’s all.”

Dean blinked at him, a little surprised himself now. “Wait… Really?” he said. 

“Yeah, really,” the man said, shaking out the newspaper he’d been looking through as he returned his attention to the obituaries. 

_The obituaries?_

“No, I mean we really do… that?” Dean said, hesitating over voicing exactly _what_. 

The question was still clearly implied, though, and the man looked up at him again, this time with an incredulous expression of worry. “Yeah,” he said slowly. 

Dean let out a shaky breath and nodded. He had _thought_ they did, had sensed when he was in these dreams with this guy that they were more than just brotherly. There was a level of intimacy sometimes that went a little too far. 

“Dean, are you alright?” the man asked him. 

Dean shook his head and took another drink of his beer. “I’m… No, I’m not,” he said abruptly. He put his beer back down on the napkin and looked across the table at him. He met the man’s eyes and it didn’t make Dean flinch when he looked back at him. 

He wasn’t bothered by that here, he’d found that out early on. But there was a level of awareness to this dream that was usually lacking. He was always more forceful, more confident, more… just _more_. He was himself, but different, and this time he was still different, but there was something different about _that_ this time too. Again. And yeah, it felt a lot like these dreams were always changing the rules on him like that, but it didn’t matter. He’d never been able to ask what he desperately wanted to ask the man sitting across the table from him now. 

“Okay,” the guy said, lowering his hands with the newspaper a little to give Dean his attention. “What’s wrong? You get a bad onion in your burger or something?”

“What?” Dean said. “No. No, I…” Dean sat up straighter and leaned over the table on his elbows, staring into the man’s face. His eyes weren’t green after all, he could see that now that he was closer. They were a strange combination of bluish grey and brown, mixed together like dots of ink on paper until they just looked green. 

“Dean,” the man said calmly, leaning a little back from Dean, who was right up in his face. “I’m really digging this intensity you got going on, but you know that thing called personal space you’re always telling Cas about? You’re violating mine, man. Sit down.”

Dean frowned, lowering his eyes thoughtfully back to the tabletop. There were more symbols carved and scratched into the wood, which was weird because places like this usually had a lot of names carved into the wood. Not that he frequented places like this, because he didn’t; too many people and they stared a lot. But he watched TV sometimes and bars always had things like _Suzy ♥ Timmy 4 Evr_ scratched into the tops of tables. Even Dinky’s had some peoples’ names written in permanent marker on the tables and booths. But these were like runes of some kind, which was a whole different kind of weird. 

“Dean? Are you sure you‘re okay?”

Dean looked up again and fixed his gaze on the man across from him. “Sorry,” he said. “Ah… I gotta ask you something.”

“Okay, shoot,” the guy said, folding his paper up. Apparently he had decided that the obituaries just weren’t that important or Dean wasn’t going to let him read them. 

For some reason, Dean found this amusing and smiled faintly. “Yeah,” he said. “I gotta ask you… I gotta _know_. What’s… What’s your name?”

For a second he didn’t say anything, just stared at Dean in confusion. Then he shook his head and laughed. “Yeah right,” he said. “Quit messing around, jerk. We’re on a job.”

“We are? Wait, I mean I’m not messing around,” Dean said. He leaned over the table a little again, forcing him to look at him. “I’m not, I swear to God. I really… Tell me your name.”

“Dude, what the hell is _wrong_ with you,” the guy said. “Okay, look. I’m Sam,” he said, pointing at himself, “and you’re Dean.” He repeated the gesture, a little smile quirking the corner of his mouth like the whole thing was a joke. “Me Sam… You Dean. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Dean said on an exhaled breath. “Sam,” he repeated, a thrill of joy at the name. At _knowing_ it. “And we’re… boyfriends?”

Sam’s mouth fell open a little, then he snorted and shook his head. “Damn, man, that is some serious beer,” he said. 

“But… I thought you said we were together,” Dean said, his heart sinking a little because he’d kinda liked the idea.

“Dean, what the fuck is wrong with you? Did you get some kind of extra angel whammy when Michael sent us back here?” Sam demanded. When Dean just stared at him, he rolled his eyes. “Dude, we’re brothers.”

“But…” Dean frowned and rubbed the back of his neck. 

“ _And_ we’re together,” Sam said patiently. 

“Oh,” Dean said. He thought about that, running his tongue over the back of his teeth. “ _Oh_.”

“Yeah, oh,” Sam said. He chuffed out a soft laugh and picked up his paper again. 

“Sam,” Dean said, tasting the name in his mouth as he said it. He felt in his pockets. “Sam?”

Sam looked at him over the paper. “What?”

“Ah… Where are my cigarettes?”

“Your… Dude, you don’t smoke,” Sam said. 

“Yes I do,” Dean said immediately. “Mom says I smoke way too much, actually. She’s--”

“ _Mom_ says?” Sam said. 

“Um… Well she would say it if… you know,” Dean said, remembering that his parents were probably dead here. 

“Right,” Sam said skeptically. He got up from his chair with his paper and took Dean’s beer out of his hand to put it down on the table. “Come on, we’re going back to the motel. You need to lay down or something. I can’t fucking deal with this and if there’s something going on, this is probably the last place we want to be.”

“There’s nothing going on,” Dean protested, but he got up anyway. 

“Come on, Dean,” Sam said, starting for the door. 

“Sam, wait,” Dean said, a little scared now because everything was _stretching_. Sam was getting farther away and the whole world was getting more out of focus. He wondered distantly just how much beer he had drank, then he was calling for Sam. “Sam! Sammy, wait!”

“Come on, Dean.”

“I am coming, just wait for me!” Dean tried to yell after him, frustrated when most of it didn’t make it out of his mouth at all. 

“Come on, Dean. Wake up, honey…”

“No,” Dean said, but he opened his eyes.


	2. II.

Cause I don't want to get over love  
I could listen to my therapist,  
Pretend you don't exist  
And not have to dream of what I dream of

_The Magnetic Fields_

 

The curtains were pulled open again when Dean came awake and the light was fainter than when he‘d crawled into bed, but it was still too much. Still too invasive. 

And all the noise in his head, all the fear and that clawing sense of _wrongness_ was back. The wind was blowing through that hole in his soul again and Dean felt his eyes water with it. “No,” he moaned, turning his face into his blanket. “Sam,” he whispered, holding the name to him like it would save him. “Sam.”

“Dean?”

Dean peeked over the edge of his comforter to find his mother staring at him with wide, green eyes. Her face was a little more pale than usual and her mouth was pinched closed against her teeth. She looked… afraid? That couldn’t be right. His mother was fearless. Besides, Dean had been sleeping, he hadn’t even done anything. 

“What’s wrong?” Dean said, sitting up quickly. “Is Dad--?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Mary assured him. “Your father’s fine. He… He just got home. Dean…” She hesitated and frowned at him, looking worried and still upset despite her assurances. “Dean, who were you talking to?”

Dean looked at her blankly. 

“Just now,” she insisted. 

“I… I wasn’t talking to anybody,” Dean said. He swallowed and looked down at his hands nervously. “I was dreaming.”

“Oh,” Mary said. “Okay, honey. Well… come on down for dinner when you’re ready.”

Dean just wanted to go back to sleep. He didn’t care about dinner, he didn’t want to tell them about his day or see the disappointed look in his father’s eyes when he talked about his visit with Dr. Fraus. He wanted to be back in his head with _Sam_. 

“Okay,” Dean said. “I’ll… I’ll be right down.”

Def Leppard was on the radio in the kitchen when Dean went down to dinner. His dad had turned it down for Mary’s sake so it wouldn’t blast her while she was cooking and probably just because he knew she didn’t like it. John was setting the table when Dean came into the kitchen and he stood there watching them for a little while. It made him happy to see them there like that, to be there with them like that, but it hurt like so much broken glass being ground into his raw open and bleeding heart that it just wasn’t right and he couldn’t shake that feeling even now. He wanted to allow himself to be happy and let that be enough, but it wasn’t. There was still that hollow, whistling place inside him that wouldn’t let him be. 

“Hey, Dean,” John said when he noticed him standing there. “You alright, son?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that,” Dean muttered. He smiled to take the sting of annoyance out of his words and John smiled back at him, a little relieved. 

“You have a good day?” John asked. 

There was a wariness to the question that always made Dean wonder why he even asked it if it bothered him so much, but Dean nodded his head and tried to make his smile genuine. 

“That’s good then,” John said. “Your mother made lasagna.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially and glanced toward where Mary was getting the lasagna out of the oven. “She said something about eggplant. Try to be nice.”

Dean made a face and Mary, on her way to the table, gave John a stern look. “It’s good for you,” she said in defense of her lasagna. “You’ll eat it and like it, John Winchester, or you can eat some of the dog’s Kibbles n’ Bits and see how you like that.”

John held his hands up in surrender, grinning. He kissed her cheek when she set the dish down on the potholder in the middle of the table and Mary smiled back at him, mollified. 

“I love you guys,” Dean said abruptly. Mary and John both turned to stare at him and Dean fidgeted uneasily under their eyes. “Um… I just wanted you to know,” he said. “That’s all.”

John and Mary exchanged a _look_ , one that they seemed to reserve only for times when Dean did something deeply upsetting. Then they both smiled at him with smiles that didn’t quite reach their eyes.

“Okay, honey,” Mary said. 

“We love you, too, son,” John said. 

Dean smiled back at them because they needed him to, but he felt really stupid. “Okay,” he said, ducking his head with embarrassment as they finished setting the table and all sat down. 

The lasagna with eggplant actually wasn’t that bad and Dean ate with his eyes on his plate while his parents talked. They talked about the shop and about a friend of Mary’s from work and the whole time, Dean could feel them both looking at him. Mary looked more than John and though John was always concerned, Mary was always so sad and Dean hated that he made his mother look like that. She was the most beautiful woman in the world and should never be sad for anything, but it was something he couldn’t help. Something in his blood. 

Something genetic? Dean thought maybe so. That would explain why his mother was always so sad and so scared and still always so nice and sweet to him even when he wasn’t. Even when he was Being Crazy or having a Bad Day. She didn’t yell and she had never hit and she blamed herself, so consequentially she took the brunt of Dean’s very worst days. Dean didn’t know why, but he thought maybe his mother did that because he got it from her. He didn’t know his grandparents because they died before he was born, but maybe they had been crazy too and now Dean was but it had skipped his mother and passed over Adam. Maybe Dean had been the lucky winner of some cosmic game of genetic Russian roulette.

He wasn’t supposed to think like that or know things like that, though, so he couldn’t even tell Mary he was sorry or that he forgave her.

The phone rang as they were finishing dinner and Mary went to answer it while Dean and his dad cleared the table. Dean heard enough of Mary’s side of the conversation as he was putting the dishes in the sink to figure out it was Adam on the other end calling from college. He ran water on the plates and hurried to leave the kitchen without being noticed, but he didn’t quite make it. 

“Dean, here, come talk to your brother,” Mary said, holding out the phone to him. “He’s coming home in a couple of weeks to visit. He wants to talk to you.”

Dean shook his head emphatically no and avoided taking the phone. “I… I’m tired. I’m going to bed. I… can’t.”

“Honey,” Mary said, disapproving but still patient as always. “Just for a little while. He’s your brother.”

“No,” Dean said, pleading with her with his eyes to understand. “I _can’t_.”

“This is ridiculous, boy. You lived in this house for eighteen years with him while he was growing up in the room right down the hall from yours,” John said. He wasn’t unkind about it, but he was much more impatient and exasperated with him than Mary. “You never got along much, but you didn’t really start this nonsense until after he moved out, so what gives here?”

“It’s better,” Dean whispered. 

“What?” John said, though Dean was pretty sure he’d heard him. 

Dean tapped his finger with savage emphasis against his right temple. “It’s _better_ ,” he said again, louder. “Still _wrong_ but not always as bad. That’s all. I’m going to bed now, I _can’t_.”

Dean fled the kitchen and hurried upstairs to his room, leaving them behind to stare after him in confusion. He knew he had confused them, probably hurt Mary’s feelings and Adam’s if he were listening, and probably made his dad a little bit mad. He couldn’t help it, though. Some things just made everything in his head feel like his eyes were crossing and Adam was the worst of those things. It wasn’t Adam’s fault, it wasn’t even _Adam_ that upset him because Adam was a pretty cool kid and always had been, but it was _Adam_ because Adam shouldn’t be there. Adam should never have been there.

~~*~~

Dean tried to sleep that night, he really did, but it wouldn’t happen. He lay there in bed listening to his parents in the house, the cars passing outside, the sound of a dog barking down the block, the news on TV right before his parents went to bed, then he lay there some more and stared at the ceiling. All he wanted to do was the same thing he had been wanting to do since the dreams first started; he wanted to sleep. But sometimes, like now, the drugs worked against him instead of for him and he just couldn’t.

With a regretful sigh, he rolled out of bed and got dressed to leave. 

Dean often sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night, so he was good at it by now. He’d been doing it since he was in his early teens, about the time everything up in his head that was just a _little_ messed up started to get _really_ messed up. When he was still going to high school, he’d hitch a ride or walk over to the school, sit on the swing and watch the stars while he listened to the wailing emptiness inside himself, trying to decipher what it meant. After he had to leave public school because he got too bizarre for stressed out teachers at a substandard pay grade to be expected to deal with, he discovered the local community college had an engineering building. The engineering building was ten stories high with access to the roof and they didn’t lock it up until midnight. He would go up there and stay all night, spread his coat out on the floor and lay down on it to stare up at the sky and bask in the relative silence of being alone on top of the world. 

The first time he did that, his mother and father were in a panic when he returned home. The maintenance people didn’t go through and unlock the doors until eight in the morning, so Dean hadn’t gotten home early enough to sneak back into the house unnoticed. Dean calmed them both by telling them the truth--he had gone to the school because he couldn’t sleep and he had fallen asleep. They believed him and, unlike most parents would have done, they let it drop. 

Now that he was an adult, his parents were used to it all and the only real precautions he took when leaving the house were to tread softly and carefully lock the door behind himself when he left. He didn’t even leave a note, they knew. 

The local community college was three miles east of their house, but Dean didn’t mind the walk. On a good night when everyone was abed or out on the town somewhere _else_ , he could hunch up his shoulders and watch the speckled pavement under his feet as he walked, the rhythm of his footsteps a kind of soothing, monotonous form of meditation where he could tune the world out, tune the rhythm out, even sometimes tune out the maddening itch of his own insanity. Lawrence, Kansas was a big city, but they lived in the suburbs so when he walked to the school, most nights were good nights. So good sometimes, he had been known to walk right by the campus and not even notice it until something would make him look up; a shout, a bark, a lewd cat-call. 

Dean thought about that now as he walked and it made him smile a little. Then it made him remember Jolene because Jolene didn’t make pervert noises at him, but she didn’t have to. She stared with a lonely, covetous kind of hunger at him that was louder than any appreciative little whistle could have been. And maybe Dean didn’t do that kind of thing or even really think it sounded like fun at all because _touching_ and touching was very _no_ , but he wasn’t stupid or completely ignorant, either. So he climbed up to the roof of the local community college’s engineering building to sleep sometimes; that didn’t make him like some kind of non-functioning Gilbert Grape type retard. Even if he thought sex sounded like a disgusting, invasive waste of time, he still knew that made him even more of a freak because almost no one else thought that. There were magazines, TV commercials, movies, music, it was _everywhere_. And Jolene was pretty obvious. 

And Jolene’s face had been the face of a monster when he saw her earlier. In the excitement of finally learning the name of the man in his dreams-- _Sam_ \--he had nearly forgotten it. He remembered it now and even the memory made his skin crawl. There were two ways to look at it, the way Dean figured it, and the way most people would look at it, Dean was crazy, therefore Jolene’s face had not been the face of a monster because Dean was _crazy_ and that explained everything. However, as Dean was the crazy person, he liked to think he had a better handle on what was and was not a figment of his imagination or product of his misfiring synapses than these kinds of people. He disagreed. Just because no one else appeared to _see it_ did not make what he had seen unreal. It was very much real.

Something had happened to Jolene’s face. How did no one else see it, though? It wasn’t like a little scar or a freckle, it was her _entire face_. It was God playing twister with her facial tissue. 

It was gross and the very minor possibility that it _was_ something in his head and not something really real just made it even worse because that? That was new. 

It was only 10:15 when Dean got to the school and because he looked like any other average guy that might be a middle-aged returning student, no one ever bothered him. Drunk people sometimes tried to pick him up and not-so-drunk people sometimes tried to talk to him, but Dean was pretty good at extricating himself from such unwanted situations. ‘Accidental’ rudeness was one of the few perks of being certifiably whacked and he was pretty good at playing the crazy card if the circumstances demanded it. 

Thankfully, tonight circumstances did not and he took the stairs up to the roof without meeting anyone along the way. Of course, most people would never take the stairs all the way to the tenth floor because that meant climbing twenty flights of stairs, twenty-five stairs per flight, and people were always in a hurry. Although, by the time he reached the roof Dean was usually a little dizzy from climbing in circles to the top like that, he didn’t really mind it that much. Dizziness was nothing, comparatively speaking. Elevators were deathtraps.

When he stepped out onto the roof, Dean leaned his back against the closed door, let his head thump back against it, and felt in his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter. With his eyes closed, he could hear the steam rising through the ventilation, the sound of the campus power plant not far away, the scratching scuffle of brittle little cockroach feet, and very distantly, the bass of music played way too loud coming across the campus from the resident halls. The familiarity of it was intensely soothing and he thought perhaps he would sleep after all, just not at home in his bed tonight. 

He fumbled a cigarette out of the pack without looking, put it in his mouth, and lit it with a satisfied grumble as he inhaled. 

Something crashed off to his left and Dean’s eyes snapped instantly open, searching. Someone was on the roof with him, probably just another student who had wandered up there drunk and passed out or one of the maintenance people having a cigarette of their own before locking the building up for the night, but Dean still stood away from the door and craned his neck to see. 

“Hello?” he called softly, not sure if he really wanted a response if it was going to be a campus employee. They’d demand to see his student ID, then make him leave whether he had one or didn’t. He didn’t, though he could have obtained a fake one if he wanted it. “Hello? Who’s there?”

Something clattered again followed by a painful groan. Then a gruff, strained voice said, “Me.”

Dean considered this for a minute then, feeling like he was being led straight into the punch-line of a knock-knock joke, he said, “Me who?”

There was no reply for a long time. Then whoever it was coughed, spat something, and managed to pull themselves upright so they could lean around the wall obscuring them from Dean’s sight. Big blue eyes blinked at him in the dark from a face Dean was _positive_ he had never seen before and the stranger said, “It’s you. I made it.”

“You did what?” Dean said, watching him with wary confusion. After all, he wasn’t the only crazy person on the planet and some of the other ones got violent. “Who are you?”

The man with the blue eyes groaned and lifted a hand to rub at his forehead like it pained him. “This introduction seems a bit… redundant, but I am Castiel.”

“Good for you,” Dean said. The strange man said the name like he expected Dean to know it. Dean noticed his tie and long coat and frowned. “Are you a teacher?”

Castiel’s cracked lips quirked in amusement and he shook his head, then winced at the movement. “Sometimes. Most often against my will and better judgment.”

Dean didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. 

After a few minutes, Castiel forced himself to stand straight and peered at Dean in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the usual rude, uncomfortable-making kind of staring, it was more like Dean was a bug of a kind that Castiel almost recognized, but a new and previously undiscovered species of it. It was weird as hell, but that was exactly the impression Dean got; a detached breed of fascination coupled with a sort of strange recognition. 

“This is not right,” Castiel muttered to himself. He put his hands in his coat pockets and shrugged his shoulders, hunching them against the light breeze. “I was right. This is wrong.”

“What?” Dean said. He was getting the feeling this was going somewhere, probably unpleasant, that meant he wasn’t going to be left alone to have his nap on the rooftop. “What’s wrong? Um… Are you okay? Maybe--”

“ _Everything_ is wrong with you,” Castiel said. “How can you not feel that?”

Dean’s eyes narrowed and he barely restrained himself from decking the man because seriously? He did not need some strange guy he had just accidentally stumbled upon up on a rooftop to tell him he had issues. That was why he had a therapist. “I’m just… I’m gonna go. Let you do… whatever,” Dean mumbled.

He flicked his cigarette away and turned to go back down the stairs and hopefully make it out before he got locked in for the night. 

“I will see you again,” Castiel said. “This must be put right. One little thing manages to fall out of place… Your mother should have known better. _You_ should have known better. What were you thinking? ‘There’s a big difference between dying and never being born,’ you said and tell me something, Dean, is there _really_?”

Dean whipped around, a thrill of some kind of excitement and alarm making his heart leap inexplicably into the back of his throat at these words and that _voice_ taking that oddly familiar tone with him, though he had never in his life met this man. He said, “I never said that--” then stopped. 

Castiel was gone and Dean was alone on the rooftop. A moment before that was exactly what he had wanted, but now he wanted to be able to call the man back and demand he explain himself. He looked around, but the rooftop was abandoned, the only company to be had a couple of scurrying cockroaches and the chill wind. 

If he didn’t know better, Dean would think he was starting to lose his mind.

~~*~~

After he calmed his racing heart, Dean almost managed to convince himself that he imagined everything. Jolene’s fucked up face and the weirdo talking about his mom and things Dean had said that Dean had never said; all of it. He wasn’t sure when the switch in his mind flipped and he stopped being sure as hell it was all real and started hoping that none of it really was, but somewhere in there it did. By the time he stretched out on his back to relax, the only thing he hoped wasn’t a delusion was the one thing in his life that most closely resembled one: Sam. 

Laying there with his head pillowed on his folded coat, staring up at the sky through a lacework pattern of steam rising from the ventilation, Dean counted the stars. It was something he did a lot of the time to help him sleep. He would count stars where other people would count imaginary sheep, but he never ran out and each one was a little different. This time, he was sleepy and counting when he became distracted by the moon.

It was almost full. One more night and it would be full and ready to wane again. There was something about the moon… something he knew… something about the _full_ moon. What was it? People acted funny. People and their neighbors’ many cats acted very strangely around the full moon. The moon pulled the tide. The moon was earth’s only natural satellite. The Man in the Moon. Wolves howled at the moon. 

_Werewolves…_

But that was nonsense, he told himself, though on the brink of sleep, it didn’t much feel like nonsense. It felt like something he had believed to the point of knowing it right down to his bones not so very long ago. Except Dean was a realist. Most people didn’t think so because they found the idea of his extreme mental instability an unlikely companion to reason and rational thinking. But Dean didn’t believe in things like the Man in the Moon or werewolves.

Dean yawned and rolled onto his side, pulling his folded coat in tighter to his chest.

He believed in what he could see and touch and until he ran his fingers through the pelt of a werewolf, they didn’t exist. 

“Dean?”

Dean opened his eyes and he was laying on his stomach with his arm wrapped around a lumpy pillow. He blinked in confusion and looked around the small room. A motel room, it looked like, though Dean had never spent the night in a motel in his life. He wanted to twist around and look for the source of that achingly familiar voice that had spoken his name, but instead he ran a hand through his hair and crawled out of the bed, going to the bathroom. 

“Damn, man, you scared the hell out of me,” Sam said behind him. “You know you’ve been asleep all day?”

“Oh yeah?” Dean said, and the words were coming out of his mouth, but they weren’t _his_ words. “What the fuck happened? Did I get drunk and not know it or something like that? You slip me a roofie, Sammy?”

Dean turned his head to look at Sam over his shoulder and _there he was_ , sitting there in a chair by the bed that he’d pulled up from the table by the window. He was looking at him and he was so worried, little frown lines etched between his brows. His hair was too long and he was wearing the same softly worn cowboy shirt he’d been wearing the last time and Dean wanted to go over there and _touch_ him, a desire that was too alien for words, but almost painfully true. 

“No, I didn’t slip you a roofie,” Sam said. He rolled his eyes in exasperation and stood up, pulling the chair back over to the table where it belonged. “You really don’t remember?”

Dean frowned. “I remember going into that bar. You were reading the newspaper and I was going to grab some food and a beer while we talked. I ordered it and… that’s it,” Dean said. And still, these were not his words because he didn’t remember _any_ of that. He didn’t even know what he was talking about. “Next thing I know, I wake up with you watching me sleep. Creepy, Sam. All I’m saying.”

“And you don’t remember anything else?” Sam said. 

“Like what?” Dean said. He turned back around to look at Sam and survey the room. “Wasn’t Cas supposed to be here when we got back? Wait… what day is it?”

“Dude, just stop talking before you freak me out, okay?” Sam said. “I’m serious. What the hell is going on with you? You didn’t even know who I was back there, you know that? You asked me my _name_ , then you asked me if I was your _boyfriend_.”

Dean blinked at him in surprise, but he _did_ remember that and he was starting to figure a few things out--at least he thought he was--and it was beginning to scare him. “Boyfriend, _right_. Okay, so I blacked out and had temporary amnesia,” Dean said. “Did you ask Cas about it?”

“Yeah. He poked and prodded at you, said _hmm_ , then told me there was something very wrong,” Sam said. 

“Did he bother to clarify?” Dean asked and he realized they were talking about the weird guy he’d met up on the roof. 

“No, except I think it’s something to do with the whole… time travel thing,” Sam said. 

“The _what_?” Dean asked and this time that was _him_ , then against his will he snapped his mouth closed and shook his head as if to clear it. “So,” Dean said, speaking slowly and carefully now, “what is it? I left some of my brain back there in Kansas?”

Sam shrugged. “I hope not,” he said. “Cas said he was going to find out, then he just left.”

Dean scrubbed his hands over his face and sighed. “Alright, then we’ll just have to wait,” he said. “Until then, I’m hitting the shower.”

“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, eyeing him with concern. “I’m gonna go across the street to that sandwich place and get us something while you do that. You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Dean said. He turned and went into the bathroom, the whole time trying to make himself stop and go back and say something more or just say nothing, maybe put his hand on Sam’s shoulder to feel his real solid warmth under his hand and _know_. 

Dean closed and locked the bathroom door, then turned to the sink and leaned on it on his elbows with his head down, breathing hard. Something was making his heart race, he realized. He turned the cold water on, cupped some in his hands, and splashed it on his face a few times, then turned it off and finally lifted his head to look at his own face in the mirror. 

He stared until his own face stopped making sense, until the mirror stopped being a flat surface and became malleable as water. He stared and he noticed a scar in the corner of his right eye and four more silvery ones on his forehead over his left eye like they had been made by claws, and Dean didn’t have those marks in the world where he stuck prescriptions for antipsychotics to the refrigerator with smiley face magnets. There were blond highlights in his hair from sunlight that Dean had never walked through and something cold and calculating in his eyes that didn’t belong there. As he stared at himself in the mirror, it became less and less like staring into his own reflection and more and more like coming face to face with someone who looked a scary lot like himself. 

“Yeah, you’re in there, aren’t you?” Dean said to him from the mirror and he suddenly felt exposed and afraid. “I see you. I _feel_ you.” He gestured toward his temple. “All scrambled up in there and you’re so in love with him, aren’t you? I can feel that, too, and it’s a bad idea, buddy.”

He was quiet for a minute and they stared at each other. Finally, Dean tried to speak again like he had before when Sam mentioned time travel and, not sure if he could do it, he said, “I can’t help it.”

Dean smiled slowly at him from the mirror and nodded, giving him a sympathetic look. “I know,” he said. “And you’re no demon, I know that, too. Though what the fuck’s going on here, I have no idea.”

He was dreaming anyway and this shit was completely crazy from the beginning, so Dean just said, “I’m dreaming.”

Dean’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Oh yeah?”

“I’m sorry,” Dean said, not sure why he was sorry because it was _his_ dream.

Dean nodded and seemed to accept this--a lot more easily and calmly than could have ever been expected. “You want to see something?” he asked. “Something about Sam?”

“Yes,” Dean said. “Oh yes.”

Dean smiled from the mirror again, this time a touch of something smug and wicked in his expression. Then he closed his eyes. “It’s a memory,” he said. “From the first time.”

The memory opened up before him and Dean was kneeling in the grass by the edge of a pond washing his hands in the cold water. Across the pond there was a swing set and a playground. Off to the right there was a picnic table and a pretty tree with cotton blossoms blowing white fluffy lint through the air. 

Dean stood up and wiped his wet hands on the thighs of his jeans, then turned and started walking up the side of a short embankment toward where his car was parked and Sam was waiting for him. He had spilled a can of soda and his fingers were sticky, so he’d stopped there in the park to find a place to wash his hands. Instead of walking down with him, Sam had stayed behind in the car.

Now as he walked up to where he’d parked the car, Dean could see Sam sitting there on the hood, his long legs splayed with his heels hooked against the bumper, a book open in his lap that he wasn’t reading because he was looking out over the nearly vacant park. His hair had been too long even then, the time between haircuts lengthened by his need to rebel against their father’s insistence that he looked like a slob, and the wind had blown a puff of cotton into it that tickled at his cheek when he turned his head. 

He smiled at Dean when he saw him and closed his book, the sun which was going down touching his gold brown hair and his teenager’s tanned skin until he almost glowed, and Dean loved him. A switch flipped somewhere between his head and his heart and everything changed from _I love my brother_ to _I love Sam_ in an instant. It was a hard thing to realize and strange how different the two feelings were at the core, but when Dean reached him, he put his hand out and touched Sam, let his fingers caress in a way that was not brotherly at all.

Sam didn’t make him stop, he just smiled and looked oddly relieved to see him. Dean put his hands on Sam’s thighs and he spread his legs to allow Dean to stand there and pull him close. He was young and in a lot of ways innocent, in a lot of ways not, and when Dean started to kiss him, Sam kissed him back and it wasn’t clumsy. It was like Sam had been waiting for him. 

Dean opened his eyes and suddenly the memory was being pushed back under a wall where he couldn’t get to it. He tried to pull it back, but it slipped away, still playing there somewhere where Sam’s voice echoed hollowly on a moan remembered from long ago. He could have cried or screamed in frustration, but Dean clenched his jaw down on these sounds and refused to let him. 

“Sorry, pal, but the rest is mine,” Dean told him. Dean realized that had been the point of the memory all along. Dean was telling him that whoever was hanging out in his head with him might be in love with him, but Sam was _his_.

Disappointment slipped in beside the painful yearning he’d been feeling since he first opened his eyes in this dream world months before and Dean wanted to fight about it, but instead he let it go. It was a dream, he reminded himself. He probably made the whole memory up inside his head anyway. He could always make up more. 

He retreated back into silence and without him to talk to anymore, Dean stripped down and stepped into the shower. Distantly, he noticed that he had scars all over his body, that his skin was more tanned and his muscles more dense. There was a weird tattoo on his chest that looked like some sort of occult symbol and a burn scar in the shape of a hand on his left arm. That was probably the strangest mark of all because in the real world, how would something like that even happen?

Dean didn’t know, but it was just one more thing that made him more and more certain that this dream--and the ones before--weren’t as real as he’d begun to hope on some level that they were. Things like handprints burned into the skin were straight out of dream logic, where everyone floated and things were always contrariwise because they couldn’t help it. 

He put his jeans on when he got out of the shower but he left his shirt and the rest on the floor and went out into the main room, toweling his hair as he followed the scent of food. Sam was back and he’d brought them both Subway from the place across the street. He was sitting at the table, leaned back against the wall by the bed to look out the window when Dean walked over and picked up the nearest bag to sniff. 

“What is this?” he asked. 

“Meatball marinara with onions, tomatoes and extra cheese,” Sam said. He picked a slice of cucumber from his own sandwich and ate it, watching Dean. 

“Have I told you lately that I love you, Sammy?” Dean said and _he_ hadn’t been responsible for saying that, but Dean knew he would have flushed with embarrassment anyway. Even if he meant it.

“Not lately,” Sam said. He grinned at him. 

“Dude, what the hell are _you_ eating?” Dean said. 

“Veggie club,” Sam said. “Want a bite?”

Dean shook his head and made a retching noise. “Gross. No way.”

Sam shrugged. “I got you cookies. They don’t do pie.”

“They should do pie,” Dean said. He unwrapped the top of his sandwich and took a big bite of the gooey, tomatoey, cheesy thing Sam had brought him. “Everyone should do pie. God this is good. Are you sure I wasn’t out longer? I’m starving.”

“I think maybe Michael fried some of your brain cells, but that wouldn’t fuck with your stomach,” Sam said. 

“Sounds just like something that dick would do, too,” Dean said. He sat down on the edge of the bed near where Sam was sitting at the table, bouncing a little before he settled. “I hate that guy. He’s an ass- _hole_.”

Sam laughed. “I think that’s wrath, huh? I mean… that counts as something done out of spite, so it’s like… a deadly sin. Are you sure he’d do that? On purpose?”

“He’d totally do that if he thought he could get away with it. The fucker,” Dean said, talking around another mouthful of his sandwich. “Angels suck.”

Sam made a sound of agreement in his throat and finished the first half of his sandwich. He wiped his hands on a napkin and took a drink of his soda, the carbonation bubbling in the straw as he sipped it. 

Dean watched him, his eyes following each movement, memorizing it for later in case he might need to remember. In case this was it. Dreams were funny things, and just because they often repeated didn’t mean they always would. Knowing that made him at once sad and deeply envious of the strange twin whose eyes he was watching through with all the scars that weren’t his. 

He swallowed the food in his mouth and reached over on the table to put the rest of the sandwich down and every movement was like pushing through deep water, but he did it. He took control of the body and the dream and wrestled it into just enough submission to lean over and kiss Sam. 

It surprised them both, Sam just because he clearly hadn’t expected it, and Dean because he couldn’t believe he had actually _dared_. But then Sam smiled at him in a pleased way and he didn’t laugh at him or shove him back, but caught Dean’s chin against his thumb and drew him back again, pressed his mouth to Dean’s and opened under his lips, teasing him gently with his tongue until Dean responded. 

Dean didn’t know much about kissing, though he had seen it done by others often enough. It was all part of his aversion to strange touching and on a personal level, he knew even less about it than he did about sex, but Sam either didn’t notice or he noticed his hesitation and didn’t care. He turned in his chair at the table and pulled Dean down on the corner of the bed until he was partly sitting on the edge of the mattress and nearly sitting in Sam’s lap. Sam’s hands were rough with calluses, making whispering sounds on his skin as he pulled them both down Dean’s sides to grasp his hips, and Dean kept waiting to freak out about the contact, for his skin to come alive like biting insects, but it never happened. He kissed Sam back the best that he could, following his lead because Sam seemed to know precisely what he was doing, and the whole time his head was spinning because he felt like he was racing to catch up. 

Dean brought his hands up and grabbed the front of Sam’s shirt, leaning into him as Sam pulled him closer, and he kissed him and tried not to give himself away as a complete imposter the whole time. He felt the tug of the Dean he wasn’t trying to pull back control of himself, then he felt him relax and stop fighting and he couldn’t think why that was. Just like he didn’t understand why he was dreaming this or what any of it meant. He wanted to wrap himself around Sam, who he barely knew and yet couldn’t get enough of, couldn’t get close enough to, and he wanted to understand it and he never wanted to leave. 

_Why do I love you?_ he wanted to ask, but how could he ask it? And he couldn’t stop _touching_ long enough to say the words. He doubted that Sam would know the answer, and he wondered if any of it mattered worth a damn at all since none of it was real. 

Sam ran his fingers up the side of Dean’s neck into his hair and Dean shivered and shivered. He closed his eyes, a feeling like water warmed in the sun snaking through his belly and he couldn’t stop shivering. When he opened his eyes again, he was laying on his side on the rooftop in the cold all alone. 

Dean shuddered against the cool wind and drew his legs up to his chest to huddle in his own body warmth. There was a pressing, insistent weight on the backs of his eyes and he told himself he wasn’t going to cry even as tears gathered on his lashes. He right away tried to make himself go back to sleep, but he lay there until the sun came up and it never happened.


	3. III.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers   
exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here,   
it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something   
even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another   
theory which states that this has already happened. 

_Douglas Adams_

 

Dean spent the next day miserable and alone, locked in his room with the radio turned up just loud enough that he couldn’t hear the voices of his parents or any visitors on the main floor and he barely heard his mother when she knocked at his door. He heard it because he was still awake, but he ignored her and she went away. 

On Saturday, Dean started taking the new pills Dr. Fraus had prescribed for him and he felt a little bit better. Working also took his mind off of things and it relaxed him. Rotate tires, fix a fender, putty a dent, replace a windshield, change the oil… There was no distinct pattern to it, at least not in any way that an outsider looking in would have recognized it as such, but there was a rhythm to it that was easy to fall into and distracting. He _knew_ these things, he could do these things and so what if he talked to himself? Buster Freemont, the kid his dad had hired the summer before, listened to his iPod while he worked and sang along to every song, his voice carrying over the sound of engines and machinery so that Dean got to hear all about some girl and her Apple Bottom jeans on what felt like repeat for three months. No one really cared that Dean talked to himself.

Dean had another dream on Monday night, but it was brief and like watching out of focus TV through a layer of foggy tulle. He woke up nearly crying in frustration, then tried right away to get it back, but _trying_ to dream never worked. He tried to sleep and by Tuesday he couldn’t even do that, even from the roof of the engineering building over at the community college, he just couldn’t go to sleep and so spent the night laying there watching the stars, an incredible and pervasive sense of _déjà vu_ nagging at his tired brain. On Wednesday, bone deep exhausted and so frustrated and lost that he was sick with it, Dean went to work and he had determined to stop thinking about Sam or wanting Sam and, most impossible of all, to stop loving Sam. 

The more he thought it, the less it was true, something so very akin to the whole deliberately trying to dream thing that he could have laughed or screamed or vomited in self disgust at the irony of it. Stuck in the middle to dwell on something that he couldn’t have until it felt like he was _starving_. For the first time since the feeling had began growing in him back in school, Dean felt his complete lack of ability to fill the void or control the way it dominated him. That whistling, hollow place in his mind reached its ice cold fingers into his soul and was constantly waiting, watching, on the verge of swallowing him, like a vampire, no longer satisfied to only sip and drain him of his blood, that has turned instead to devour him. 

Buster was singing Kanye West while he worked on the engine of a Buick and John was in the office talking to a guy whose wife was filling out some paper work and Dean was supposed to be switching the tires on a big 4x4 pickup but instead he was thinking and feeling and _trying to make the shit stop_. That was when it happened. 

He wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing and he _knew_ special care had to be taken with the tires on these types of trucks because there was a spring in those split rims and if he wasn’t paying attention, bad things could happen. He knew this, but he wasn’t thinking about it then because shit like that was not important when measured beside everything that was ripping him apart inside. So, because he knew this, when the spring snapped out, Dean reacted in time to save himself from a broken, maimed arm, but the thin open edges of the rim sliced him open in one quick flick from wrist to elbow and tore through the webbing of skin between his thumb and forefinger. 

Dean looked at his hand curiously and spread his fingers to watch the lips of the deep wound in his hand open and gurgle blood through his fingers. Blood was flowing from his arm, turning cold as it was touched by the air, and dripping in a steady stream off his elbow onto the concrete floor. It looked too bright there on the dirty, oil spotted floor to be real and on some distant level, Dean was wondering why he didn’t feel anything but a numb, almost buzzing sensation running the length of his arm. It was cold and it tickled where the blood slid along his skin, but he felt no pain. He felt no pain and it was a strange, almost euphoric feeling, the way the icy, cruel fingers that had been ripping at his mind suddenly became soothing and soft. 

He knew, like he knew a lot of things he wasn’t sure how he knew because it all just rattled around up in there, that there were chemicals somewhere in his brain that were responsible for this. He thought of shock and wondered if perhaps he should lay down on the floor and elevate his legs because that was what you did for shock, wasn’t it? He thought of the sarcastic things he heard about people who cut themselves and he suddenly felt like he was on the verge of discovering the answer to their secret. _This_ was why, and though as he looked down at the spreading pool of blood at his feet he knew he would never develop a taste for such a thing, he thought he understood that now. He understood the why behind it and could clearly see how that could become a place to hide. 

It was better, even if it was only for a few seconds, to feel _nothing_. It was like having the switch on a very loud, horrible soundtrack abruptly kicked off.

Dean sighed and felt his breath shake on the exhale, then a little bit of sound filtered in and Buster was screaming for John, who was throwing the glass door between the office and the shop open so hard that it crashed against the wall and Dean thought vaguely, _It’s going to break_ , but it didn’t. John slipped a little in the puddle of blood around Dean, then he was grabbing at Dean, his hands on his shoulders, shaking him. His fingers were on Dean’s arm, touching to find the wound under all the blood. 

“Dean,” he said and Dean thought he was probably shouting because he opened his mouth much wider than he had to to say the single syllable. He shook Dean once roughly, forcing Dean to look at him and focus, and Dean did, though reluctantly. “ _DEAN!_ ”

Dean winced and leaned back from his father, his ears ringing. “I…” He swallowed and felt nausea rise up in his throat, tasting like acid. “I have to sit down,” Dean said, and immediately started to sit down right there on the floor in his own blood.

John stopped him and hauled him upright with another shake. “You’re in shock, son,” he said. “I’m taking you to the hospital. Can you walk?”

“I don’t know,” Dean said. He blinked and John looked fuzzy around the edges when he opened his eyes. “Dad?”

“What?” John asked, all concern and panic rolled up in one until he was fairly shaking with it. “What is it?”

“I think you need to… find a tourniquet…” Dean mumbled, and he couldn’t stand up anymore. 

He went limp and John caught him, cursing as he hefted Dean’s weight in his arms. “BUSTER!”

“Right here, boss,” Buster said from by John’s left shoulder. “You need my car?”

“No,” John said. “Give me your belt.”

~~*~~

Dean opened his eyes and he was in another place, another strange room with textured taupe colored walls and yellow curtains that had once been white a hundred years ago. He was in a strange bed on his stomach and the first thing he noticed while he was floating in the ether between dreaming and awake was that the coverlet, which he was staring down at, was thin with obnoxiously bright colors making up an unlikely pattern of crosshatching. He could feel sweat sliding down his spine, then a tongue licking up his back to his shoulder and there were hands on his waist holding him still. 

He suddenly knew where he was and what was happening and for a second he panicked. He was in a motel room on a motel bed and Sam was touching him. He immediately started to freak out but he really couldn’t. He couldn’t make himself feel it or act upon it as he normally would have done because once again he wasn‘t in control, all he could feel was the adrenalin screaming through his blood, his heart pounding like it was going to crash through his ribcage, the smooth slide of Sam’s belly along the curve of his ass and the small of his back. He could hear himself panting and moaning, feel the worn texture of the fabric beneath him, but it was like watching the world through the painted glass of a kaleidoscope. He couldn’t even focus his attention on any one thing long enough to breach the distance of dreamlike separation until it felt _real_. Really real like it had felt only a couple of times before. 

“You could have died,” Sam whispered. 

He spoke against the back of Dean’s ear and Dean moaned, shivering at his breath along the side of his neck. Sam stroked his hands up Dean’s sides, back down to his hips, and Dean gripped the edge of the mattress. His head was swimming like his brain had been submersed in a vat of water. Water that was full of the most beautiful goldfish, which kept stealing his attention from Sam and what he was doing.

“I’m sorry, Sammy,” Dean whispered back to him. He wasn’t paying attention, though. Not until Sam dug his fingers in and pain shot up his back. Pain that surprised him by being… not very painful. 

“What would I do if I lost you like that?” Sam asked him. His hands dragged back down and Sam lifted his hips, moving against him. “If a werewolf or a vampire turned you and I had to put you down? Don’t you think about that?”

“All the time,” Dean said, though he didn’t know what he was even talking about.

Sam ran one hand up the back of Dean’s neck and fisted it in his hair, pulling his head back with a growl. It focused his attention instantly and Dean wanted to scream, suddenly afraid, but his mouth fell open and all he did was pant and whimper. The adrenaline rushing through his body had him shaking and shivering, but he thought he would probably be shaking anyway because he was suddenly scared. On some level he understood that it wasn’t all fear, either, but that this lack of fear, this pleasure that he felt in what Sam was doing to him came from somewhere else. From _elsewhere_. Perhaps from the Dean that lived with Sam and had tattoos and scars all over his body. That Dean who wasn’t him at all liked it and Dean just wanted to get away. 

There was a deep burn inside his body as Sam slowly pushed inside him and Dean’s breath hitched, his thoughts a scrambled, frantic mess as he fully realized what was happening to him. In a dream, of all places, and even in a dream he couldn’t just let it happen. On some level he had known about this and even wanted it, but not like _this_. He didn’t want to be waking up in the middle of it and lose his virginity to something that was way too akin to rape for comfort.

Except Sam would never rape him. He knew that though he couldn’t be sure he knew how he knew it. Sam was good. It was a simple and naïve thing to believe, but he did believe it. Sam was a good man and Sam would never do something like that. Dean didn’t remember it because this wasn’t Dean’s world, it was the other Dean’s world, but he had consented. He had _wanted_ at some point not so long ago. 

Knowing this, Dean had to give up his idealistic desires and fantasies about what he had hoped and thought would eventually happen and make himself calm down. There was nothing he could do about it and maybe this wasn’t how he had imagined sex with Sam when he eventually had sex with Sam in his dreams, but it was happening and it was still Sam. He still loved Sam. 

“I love you,” Dean gasped out, and it was all him that time. _All_ of it. 

Sam went very still and Dean could feel Sam looking at him. His eyes boring into him, searching for some trick or lie in it. Not because Dean didn’t love him in this other life where he didn’t live, but because that Dean, the Dean that he wasn’t, would never tell him so. Not like that. He wouldn’t just say it. For a moment Dean experienced an entirely different kind of panic, thinking Sam would figure it out because Sam was wicked smart. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew it, and if anyone would ever figure it out, it was Sam because no one knew Dean the way Sam knew Dean.

Sam surprised him by laughing. Dean tensed up at first, thinking Sam was mocking him, but Sam must have anticipated his reaction or something similar to it and he petted him, trying to make him relax again. He cupped Dean’s chin in one hand and urged him to turn his head around so he could kiss him over his shoulder, happy, surprised laughter still rolling on his tongue as he licked into Dean’s mouth and Dean felt his insides turn liquid. 

He whimpered and pulled at Sam, trying to get more of him, trying to see him, and finally Sam shoved him and Dean grasped the side of the mattress again. He looked down at his own hands and saw blood drying under his fingernails. Then Sam pulled out of him and rolled Dean onto his back on the bed, his hands closing around Dean’s wrists as he held him down, and their eyes locked. Sam paused and looked at him curiously, his head tipped inquisitively to one side, his eyes reaching right into Dean’s head to pin him there. 

He didn’t _know_ but he was starting to wonder. Dean could see the questions he wouldn’t ask every time Sam’s eyes settled on him and it scared him what he might do if he figured it out. He didn’t think Sam would ever hurt him, and he _really_ didn’t think Sam would hurt him if he understood what was actually happening, but Dean thought maybe the way they lived over here in this world where he didn’t fit made them suspicious, violent, paranoid people. He thought maybe Sam was a little too quick to violence and might hurt him before he really knew all the answers and that scared Dean. Then he reminded himself that it was all just dreams and smoke anyway, so it didn’t matter. He would wake up. 

Except he didn’t want to wake up. He wanted to stay in the sleazy motel world with Sam. 

Dean put his hands up to Sam’s face, studying his fine features. Sam looked back at him and smiled. He lowered his head to nuzzle Dean affectionately as he slid his hands under him up the mattress to cup the back of his shoulders. Dean’s fingers slipped into Sam’s hair as Sam kissed and nipped and licked his way down Dean’s throat. He shivered as he held him and his heart galloped with every single lingering kiss. 

“I love you, too,” Sam murmured to him. He lightly bit the point of Dean’s collarbone. “Jerk. You scared the holy fuck out of me. Guess you scared yourself a little, too, huh?”

“Yeah,” Dean said. He could barely force the word out, he was breathing so hard and his heart was pounding like a drum in his throat. 

“Yeah,” Sam said, mimicking him with a roll of his eyes. “Dean?”

“What?” Dean said. He pulled gently at Sam’s hair to get him to lift his head. 

“I love you,” Sam said, looking back at him with a very serious, nearly sad expression. “No matter… you know, what happens. With Michael and--”

“Sam, shut up,” Dean said. The _other_ Dean because no way would Dean ever tell Sam to shut up when he was being sweet and romantic. Apparently this was one area where he and the dream world Dean seriously parted ways. 

To Dean’s complete surprise, Sam laughed and kissed him on the mouth hungrily. Dean gasped and Sam’s quick, clever tongue flicked inside to stroke over his own. Sam shifted against him, pushing his hips down on Dean’s so that strange, pleasurable sensations rocketed up into his belly. Dean moaned and opened his legs wider, squeezing Sam’s hips between his thighs as he arched under him, trying to get closer. Sam smiled against his mouth, Dean felt it in the way his teeth pressed lightly against his lips, and shifted again, rocking. 

_I love you_ , Sam had said to him. Twice. Dean answered it instantly, without a word, every particle of his mind and body screamed, _I love you_ right back and God, oh God, he wished he could believe that Sam loved him. _Him_. He held that desire deep inside, protected and secret, and wished he could stay. He wished to be _Dean_ for Sam, covered in scars, tattooed and burned, blunt and arrogant and dangerous to be reckoned with. He wasn’t, though. He was just Dean, untouched, shy, innocent and ignorant by turns, crazy and medicated to the gills and sad, sad, sad. 

How he was even allowed to glimpse the other world, to _see_ the world where Sam lived with his Dean, he didn’t know. It came to him that it was Sam. Sam was the door, but conversely he was also the key to that door. Dean didn’t know how that could be, how he, how Sam whom he had never known except in his dreams, could be both of those things to him, but he thought it was his wretched loneliness and not his madness that had first allowed the dream world to make itself known to him. 

The world around him was starting to fade as Sam thrust into him and sexual pleasure thrummed up his spine like the knock from a tuning fork. Dean cried out and grabbed Sam, his fingers scrabbling for purchase on his sweaty skin. Sam loomed over him, his shoulders hunched slightly as he worked his hips and began to move. As he began to move, the bed rocked and the world rocked with it. The light splintered around the edges and there were fish-like shadows darting in the periphery of his vision again, little elusive fingers of reality bleeding unwanted into the dream. 

Somewhere in the darkness that clouded his eyes, Dean could hear water dripping. It echoed like the spring thaw in a deep cavern. It sounded like laughter in a faraway world.

~~*~~

“I thought you would not wake up,” a rough, vaguely familiar voice said.

In his newly awakened, newly returned to earth state, Dean wasn’t very glad to hear his state of wakefulness confirmed for him. Dean picked his head up and looked over at the chair by his bed. He was laying in a hospital bed and his arm was bandaged. He realized that a short moment before he recognized the man in the tie and trench coat watching him from the chair beside the bed. 

Dean groaned, his heart sinking somewhere close to his stomach, and he rolled over, away from the chair where Castiel sat staring at him. “Go away,” he said. 

“Dearly as I would like to, I cannot do that,” Castiel said. “You must listen to me. We haven’t much time.”

Dean wasn’t listening to him, though. He had just realized that his arousal had followed him over from his dream and not only was it deeply humiliating, it _hurt_. He moaned and drew his legs up defensively, heat and tension rippling through his abdomen. He was a normally functioning young man, he had had wet dreams, he sometimes woke up with morning wood, he had been known to masturbate, but _this_ was something altogether different from anything he had ever experienced, and close on the back of the physical pain was a sorrowful ache of loss. Like every dream he woke from lately, it hurt his heart like tape pulled slowly from a persistently unhealing wound.

Miserable, hot tears seeped from Dean’s eyes and pooled in the hollows beneath his lashes. They quickly cooled like something vile on his skin and Dean swiped at them with his arm. “Leave me alone,” he muttered. 

Castiel was so quiet for so long that he thought the man had obeyed and left him. When his hand touched Dean’s shoulder, Dean tensed so violently that he clutched at the side of the bed and almost screamed. He bit the sound back, not sure why he didn’t want to alert people to Castiel’s presence. After all, he didn’t know the guy and he seemed to be following Dean. He needed him to remain a secret, though, this he did know.

“How the hell did you get in here, anyway?” Dean demanded, suddenly rolling over to face him. 

Castiel tipped his head to one side, the gesture oddly familiar and unsettling, and sat back down in the chair beside the bed. “It is something that you have termed ‘apparating.’ I do not understand the term, but from what I have been told, it comes from a children’s book.”

“Harry Potter,” Dean said, eyeing him with absolute disbelief. 

“Yes,” Castiel said. “But that is unimportant.”

“Where’s my dad?” Dean said. He sat up. He was starting to remember what had happened and he knew his dad would be completely ape-shit. “He must be freaking out right now.”

“He is otherwise occupied at the moment,” Castiel said. A little smile, quickly there and gone, implied that he might have had something to do with John’s current state of preoccupation.

“What did you do?” Dean demanded.

“I merely suggested to the nurse in charge that he might have a good deal of paperwork to look at while you are resting,” Castiel said. 

“Suggested?” Dean said. 

“ _Strongly_ suggested,” Castiel agreed. 

“What does that even _mean_?” Dean said. 

“It is not important and I honestly do not feel comfortable confiding such things to you in your current… state,” Castiel said. 

Maddened by his evasiveness, Dean scowled at him. “I think you need to leave.”

“It is not terribly important to me what you think,” Castiel said. 

“I… What?” Dean said. 

“It is only important that you listen and that you do what I expect you to do,” Castiel said. “A grievous mistake has been made--your mistake--and we must right the situation at once.”

“What are you _talking about_?” Dean said, a touch of hysteria creeping into his voice. “I’m… Look, this is really bad timing, okay? _Really_. I just had an accident, I just woke up from this really fucked up dream I keep having and probably one of the worst pains in my life, and you’re talking about fucking Harry Potter at me and making _no sense_.”

Dean put his hands over his face, wishing with childish stupidity that Castiel would just vanish while his eyes were closed, and groaned. “Go away, go away, _GO AWAY_.”

He waited a minute, then dropped his hands and found Castiel still sitting there, now with an expression of mild annoyance on his face. 

“You have been somewhat overindulged here, haven’t you?” Castiel said. It sounded like a rhetorical question, but Dean opened his mouth to respond anyway. Castiel held up a hand to signal him to silence, his expression going from annoyed to stern in a way that made Dean immediately shut his mouth. “You have good parents and they love you, but your madness has made them spoil you in their desire to be kind and fair.”

Castiel regarded him quietly for a minute, his bright blue eyes like flames that could quickly flare and burn if Dean were to anger him. He suddenly felt a little afraid, sensing the potential for real violence beneath the man’s casual attire and unassuming appearance. He also sensed that it would not be directed at him without great provocation because Castiel was patient. He couldn’t really understand how patient, but he felt it, and he also felt that while they didn’t know each other, Castiel regarded him with a strange sort of affection.

“It is only to be expected, I suppose,” Castiel said. 

“What?” Dean said. 

“You. The way that you are because of the way that _things_ are here,” Castiel said. “You are different. Not at all the warrior I know you to be.”

“What?” Dean said again. He was starting to feel like a real moron the longer he was in Castiel’s company but honestly, _what_?

“We do not have time for this,” Castiel said. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees, bringing himself closer to Dean. “Things are happening and you are a part of them. You have tried to remove yourself from the fray and I understand your reason--it is the only reason that counts--but it cannot be allowed to pass this way. Do you understand me?”

Dean blinked at him in utter confusion. “Not even a little bit,” he said. 

“Sam has to be born,” Castiel said. “He _must_. For more reasons than just the one, he must live. The world will still end without him, you know. Nothing has been saved and much more has been lost. He cannot be _not_ born. It is not that simple.”

“Sam?” Dean said, startled to hear the name in someone else’s mouth. “What do you know about _Sam_?”

Castiel smirked at him and shook his head imperceptibly. “Much, much more than you do at this point, I’m afraid.”

“What the hell does _that_ mean?” Dean snapped, suddenly angry. How dare this stranger keep secrets from him. How _dare_ he know anything about Sam, _his_ Sammy. “Stop with the fucking riddles and just _tell me_ what you’re talking about.”

“I am talking about the end of the world, but all you hear is Sam’s name,” Castiel said. He sighed and sat back. “I should not find this surprising. That is where you are. That is _always_ where you’re going to be. You were a fool to once think otherwise and now here we are. And your poor mother blames herself.”

Dean’s mouth fell open. Just when he thought things couldn’t possibly get any more weird or confusing, impossibly, they did. “My _mother_? What the fuck do _you_ know about my mother?”

“I know that she shouldn’t,” Castiel said simply. “She shouldn’t blame herself. She could not have known.”

“Blame herself for _what_?” Dean said, his voice rising toward a shout. “Could not have known _what_?”

“She could not have known that choosing to not give birth to Sam would not work the way the three of you hoped it would,” Castiel said, his infinite patience keeping his voice calm and mild in the face of Dean’s agitation. “Perhaps if you had not already been growing in her womb, then it might have changed things. But you were and it was already too late.”

Dean had to take a deep breath and think for a minute or he was going to explode in a screaming mess of gooey, frustrated confusion right there on the hospital bed. He breathed in, breathed out, and when that wasn’t quite good enough, he did it again. “Okay, hold on. Hold the goddamn phone for just a minute. _What_?”

Castiel sighed and started to explain it again. 

“Wait,” Dean said, flapping his hands at him. “Rewind and start over. Pretend I’m not me and explain it to me like I’m five or something.”

Castiel laughed suddenly like Dean had made a joke. Dean glared at him, suspecting he was being made fun of. “You are still you in spite of it all,” Castiel said. 

“Whatever that means,” Dean muttered. 

“Like you’re five and you’re not you,” Castiel said in the tone of someone who is reminding himself to behave. “Yes, okay. You know that there are other dimensions? Timelines and perceived realities? Wheres and whens?”

“No,” Dean said. “My therapist would kill you right now for saying something like that to me, by the way.”

“Therapist,” Castiel said, mulling the word over. He made a dismissive sound and waved it off like the concept were some annoying, biting insect. “I have said that you are spoiled and I was not exaggerating.”

“Great. Well, that’s a _mean_ thing to say,” Dean said. “Can you just tell me what the hell is going on and what you’re doing here and, for that matter, who _are you_? Oh, and how do you know about Sam and how the fuck do you know my mother?”

“I was getting to that if you would please exercise some _patience_ ,” Castiel snapped. 

Dean frowned at him, then dropped his eyes to his lap. He suddenly realized that he wasn’t hard anymore and the pain he had woken up with was gone. For some reason, this made him laugh. 

“Now what?” Castiel said.

“Nothing,” Dean said, still grinning. “Sorry.”

Castiel raised a brow at him, then decided not to question him about it. “Your mother and father are Mary Campbell and John Winchester, descendents of Cain and Abel,” he began.

Dean regarded him calmly from beneath lifted brows. “No way,” he said. 

“Way,” Castiel said dryly. “Apparently there is a long line of incestuous behavior in your family tree.”

“Hey, that’s not fair. I’m not… incestuous,” Dean said. 

“Oh yes? So what you were dreaming about when I entered the room was a kind of platonic love affair?” Castiel said. 

“ _Hey_! You know what… stay out of my head,” Dean said. He flushed and couldn’t meet Castiel’s eyes. He was all the more embarrassed because Castiel was smiling at him.

“Your birth was part of the great pattern, controlled and created by God so that you might one day fulfill a preordained destiny,” Castiel said, ignoring his embarrassment. “You fought it, as is your way, and you were time and again shown that you can _not_ change the past. What is past is past, or as you like to say; what is dead should stay dead. You are not very good at taking your own advice, though.”

Dean heard the affection in Castiel’s voice as he spoke and it confused him more, but he didn’t say anything. He was beginning to suspect from pieces of what Castiel had said, that Castiel was from his dream world. Impossible as that was, it almost _had_ to be true. How else could he know about Sam? Dean had only told Dr. Fraus about Sam and he hadn’t known his name the last time he spoke with her. But Castiel knew. He knew about Sam and the other world where Dean dreamed and he _knew_ them. The way he talked about Dean said that they were friends and the way his eyes went a little faraway when he spoke of Sam said that he knew the man well. 

All of this made Dean much more interested in what he had to say. He stared at him with rapt interest and felt his heart racing with joy inside him because Castiel knowing, Castiel being _from_ there, meant that it was all more than a dream. Somewhere out there it was _real_ and if it was real, maybe Dean could have it if he listened. If he did what this weird stranger wanted him to do, maybe he could go there.

“It happened that you came face to face with your mother in a time shortly before your birth and shortly after your conception,” Castiel said. “You and Sam, you tried to convince her to leave your father so that neither of you could be born and the things that would bring on the end of the world would not come to pass. She refused.”

Dean waited for him to go on but when Castiel sat there quietly for too long, he cleared his throat. “Why?” he asked. “I mean… it’s the world. That’s more important than… well, than anything. Isn’t it?”

Castiel smiled without looking at him, his eyes downcast on his clasped hands. “No. Not more than anything,” he said. “It is extremely important, but it is not more important than anything. You taught me that, you know.”

“I did?” Dean said, awed by the concept. 

“Well… not _you_ exactly, but yes,” Castiel said. “I once believed such things were black and white as they are often painted. I made mistakes believing that. I no longer believe that, however, and that will have to be my redemption.”

“Okay,” Dean said slowly, not sure if he really understood what he was being told. “So, what happened?”

“Your mother was already pregnant with you and so she would not leave John. She also loved your father deeply, as you love your brother. What a man long ago with the rather odd name of Plato called _soul mates_. That is what they are to one another. That is also what you are to Sam and what Sam is to you. It is why you are so… disjointed,” Castiel said. 

“You mean it’s why I’m crazy,” Dean said. 

“Not precisely, but for the sake of this conversation and your understanding, yes,” Castiel said.

“Okay,” Dean said. He tried not to think too hard on that or his eyes crossed. 

“Mary soon forgot you and Sam and everything that had happened when you were there,” Castiel said. 

“Why?” Dean said. “That’s… I mean, it’s _important_ , why would she forget it?”

“She was made to forget,” Castiel said. “But, though she forgot, she carried with her a feeling of unease and fear. She made things very difficult for your father the first five years of their marriage, though she didn’t know why and neither did he. It was her fear and it kept them from being as close as they both wanted to be. It kept her from conceiving Sam because a little part of her, deep and sacred where memory is not touched by logic or reason but by instinct and emotion, remained. She was scared to have that other child because she knew that Sam could bring the world crashing down even if she didn’t remember how she knew it.”

“What about Adam?” Dean asked. “He’s still theirs, so why isn’t he the same? I mean… wouldn’t he just be Sam, only later?”

“No,” Castiel said. “If the same two cells do not touch and grow in the same time, they do not become the same person. Two other cells touch and grow and they are a completely different being. The time for Sam’s conception passed long ago in this place. Adam is a child that Mary would never have had if Sam had been born. A child that John would have conceived with another woman--a fact which also makes him different. But here your mother still lives, so there never was another woman.”

“Mom’s dead in your world, isn’t she?” Dean asked quietly. He had already suspected as much, but it still hurt.

“Yes,” Castiel said. “I’m sorry, yes she is.”

Dean sat there for a minute, thinking. He thought about his mother, how his mother had always treated him with a kind of delicate care. His father had taken his cues from her about that because Dean knew that sometimes John got frustrated with him and he was much quicker to anger than Mary. Mary was the most kind, beautiful woman in the world. It was an opinion early forged in his childhood that had never changed. He loved her more than anyone in the world, more than his father, more than anything. In this other world where Sam lived, Mary would be dead. To have that world to himself, Dean knew that he would have to choose between his lovely, kind mother and Sam. Castiel didn’t have to say it, he knew. That was the option being placed before him as Castiel spoke.

“Who are you in all of this?” Dean asked Castiel. “How do I know you? How do you know me? How do you know all of this about me?”

“I’m a friend,” Castiel said. 

“ _My_ friend?” Dean said, not sure he believed that. 

“Yours and your brother’s,” Castiel said. 

“Sam, not Adam,” Dean said. 

“Of course,” Castiel said. 

“What do you want me to do?” Dean asked. 

Castiel raised a brow at him. “I should think it would be quite clear,” he said. 

When Dean just stared at him, Castiel shook his head and sighed. “You are not stupid, but you are so stubborn sometimes that it hardly matters,” he said. “You have to choose. I cannot make you do anything, it is up to you. It has always been up to you.”

“Choose what?” Dean said, but he suspected. “Choose between this world and yours? Choose between my mother and this guy, Sam? Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Essentially,” Castiel said. Dean glared at him like Castiel had just suggested he plunge a knife through his mother’s heart. Castiel chuffed out a soft laugh. “Understand something, Dean Winchester, you would not be killing her. She is already dead. You would not be giving life to Sam. He is already alive, as I think you know. There _are_ no other worlds. There is _world_. One, within which exist many possibilities. You yourself are but one possible road, one that I hope to stop from becoming reality. If I could do this without your consent, believe me, I would.”

“So what you’re saying is that my world… _this_ world isn’t even real,” Dean said. He was frightened by the idea, but also angry at Castiel for saying something like that. It was like the first time someone told him he was crazy. He hadn’t wanted to believe it and he had been completely offended by the idea. “How do you know that _your_ world isn’t the fake one?”

“I am saying no such thing,” Castiel said, exasperated with him. “I am saying that your world, your _where_ and _when_ runs like a stream beside the river of my world. There are literally millions of such possibilities with new ones forming every second, but they rarely ever touch that river. People take a wrong turn and die, so it goes. People catch a taxi because their car gets a flat and they meet the love of their life, so it goes. Most of the time people do what they are supposed to do, one way or another. Your little stream of possibility has the singular distinction of being one of very few that I have ever seen that threatens to branch off into the river of what is my world and redirect its course. Does that make sense?”

“That’s a hell of a metaphor,” Dean said dumbly. 

“I am aware of that,” Castiel said, annoyed with him at last. “I have to rely on something as patiently unreliable as the human heart-- _your_ heart--to decide whether or not this catastrophe will occur.”

“But who the hell _are_ you?” Dean said. “You’re not just some guy. If you were just some guy you couldn’t know some of this stuff. Unless you’re making it up, and if you are, then man, you are crazier than I am.”

“It’s been said,” Castiel said. He huffed out a tired breath and leaned forward on his elbows again. “I’m an angel.”

“Right, and I’m a circus clown,” Dean said automatically. 

Castiel pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. “Believe it or don’t. You are wearing on my patience and we do not have time for me to convince you of the truth.”

This went farther toward convincing Dean than if Castiel had deliberately tried to persuade him that he was telling the truth. He didn’t care if Dean believed him because he knew that he was speaking the truth and regardless of what Dean did, he would be returning soon to his own world. Even if his world became a distant shallow stream of a possibility diminished from the once raging river of its dominion over the rest, all Dean had to do was look at him to know that he would be going back. Castiel called that raging river home. Even the frightening things that he talked about that were happening there would not keep him from going back. 

“If you’re an angel, then… this is your world, too, isn’t it?” Dean said. “All worlds as one world.”

“There are not _worlds_ ,” Castiel said. “I am not making myself clear or it is not a concept you can grasp, but there is one. One only. This is a single possibility of my world, the one world, that has not yet been fully realized. Under other circumstances, it would merely drift along beside mine, be of very little significance and never interfere with it, much like another world as you insist on saying. Somewhere in your… possible world, there is another Castiel. He is the product of many decisions that were made or not made differently here than there. I would imagine he is far less friendly than I am.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Dean said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Just stop before my head pops. I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around there being other worlds and still _not_ being other worlds. It’s giving me a headache, so just stop.”

“Fine,” Castiel said. 

“Good,” Dean said. 

Castiel stood up. “I must go now. I have remained here far too long already and this… place makes me ill.”

“But… But I still don’t know _anything_ ,” Dean said, instant panic shooting up inside him. “I don’t know how to get there or how to stay if I can find the way. Jesus, I haven’t even been able to dream about it for… for a long time. Too long. Not until just now. What am I supposed to _do_?”

Castiel frowned down at him in the hospital bed and Dean got the uncomfortable impression that he was being compared and weighed against that other Dean who was Castiel’s friend. Weighed and found severely wanting. “I am supposed to have all of the answers and give them to you for nothing,” Castiel said, a touch of bitterness and scorn in his voice. “I think not.”

“But then how am I supposed to--”

“You will be _silent_ ,” Castiel snarled. For the first time Dean looked up at him and saw the fierce creature that he really was lurking beneath the surface of the placid disguise he wore. “Listen to me. _Listen_. You know the way, it’s that same way as before. You know the law of physics which states that two objects cannot occupy the exact same space at the exact same time?”

“Yes,” Dean said. “I mean, I’ve heard that before. It makes sense.”

“Yes,” Castiel said. “It’s very true. The same is true of a single object occupying two separate spaces at the exact same time. It is not impossible, but it cannot go on indefinitely. At some point, a change will happen and either the object will no longer be the same, the spaces will merge, or the time will change. Do you understand the concept of entropy?”

“Uh… sort of,” Dean said. He was once again feeling like a moron and it was all Castiel’s fault. He desperately wished the man would just get to the damn point. 

“It is a similar concept,” Castiel said. He noticed Dean’s perplexity and rolled his eyes with a heavy sigh. “Simply put, you cannot be in two places at once. You cannot exist there and here at the same time without things devolving into chaos. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Dean said. He thought of Jolene’s twisted, mutated face in the diner and shivered. If that wasn’t a sign of things falling toward chaos, he didn’t know what was. “I think… I get it. I can’t live here and there. I have to… I have to choose.”

Castiel grunted out a soft, irritable affirmative. “And if you want to keep dreaming, I would suggest you stop taking these,” he said. He dropped an orange prescription pill bottle into Dean’s lap. 

Dean picked up the bottle and read the label. It was the last prescription Dr. Fraus had written for him. All the while telling him that she was trying to _help_ him and her little pills had been stealing his dreams. Stealing Sam and that other world from him. 

Dean closed his hand around the bottle and clenched his fingers tightly. “You’re sure?”

Castiel did not deign to reply to that one way or the other. He put his hand out and touched his first two fingertips to Dean’s forehead. It surprised Dean and his instinctive revulsion for physical contact would have made him recoil from it if he had had time, but he didn’t. The touch was there and gone in only a few seconds, during which bright soothing heat rushed like sunlight through his body and burned like heated iron to the tips of his fingers in his injured hand. 

Castiel dropped his hand and stepped back. “Your arm will be better now. I suggest you continue bandaging it anyway to avoid awkward questions,” Castiel said. “I must go. Your father will be coming to take you home.”

Dean looked down at his wrapped hand and flexed his fingers. He expected pain, but there was none. In fact, there was an abiding, comfortable warmth that went the length of his arm. Amazed, Dean looked up to find that Castiel was gone and he was alone. He looked around, half expecting Castiel to be hiding somewhere, but there was nowhere to hide even if he had wanted to. There was no way he could have left the room without Dean seeing him go, either. 

John stuck his head in the room then and smiled at Dean, relieved to see him awake and aware. “Hey, Dean,” he said. “Feeling alright?”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m… I’m great,” Dean said, still looking around for either Castiel or a way he could have left the room without Dean noticing. 

“You ready to go home, then?” John said. “Your mother’s out of her head with worry. I promised to bring you home so she could fuss at you.”

Dean smiled at him with honest pleasure. His joy was tinged with a pang of regret and sorrow. It was a sorrow, he thought, that would never leave him. No matter where he went, no matter _when_ , it would go with him. No matter what choice he made, he would suffer for it and regardless of what Castiel said, it felt like murder.


	4. IV.

If you were made of air, if you were air,  
if you were made of water, if you were water,  
if you were made of fire, if you were fire,  
if you were made of stone, if you were stone,  
or if you were none of these, but really death,  
the answer is yes, yes.

_Carol Ann Duffy_

 

Dean didn’t go see Dr. Fraus that following Friday. He had a very good excuse. Everyone, even the doctor herself, agreed that nearly bleeding to death in his father’s arms was a very good reason for not keeping his appointment. 

On his mother’s day off she dropped him off at the library and Dean spent the next two hours while she was doing the shopping looking up anything he could find about the stuff Castiel had told him. He found books on parallel realities, but most of them were science fiction or science fiction disguised as scientific theory. He also found _A Brief History of Time_ which, even if it was probably utter bullshit, was still really interesting and very well written, so he kept that. On the computer, he found everything he could ever want to know and a lot of things he didn’t about angels. Unfortunately, they were the wrong kind of angels. He found a lot of crazy shit about soul mates on the internet, too, none of which was very helpful. There were people offering ‘astrology packages,’ whatever the hell that was, people offering to be Dean’s soul mate for a reasonable fee, some crazy person claiming to have the ability to ‘map your soul mate DNA,’ which just sounded too creepy for words, and some mentions of soul mate theory that led him back to Plato. 

An hour later, Dean still wasn’t sure what the fuck soul mate theory was, but he had found what he was looking for anyway. Some girl had used Yahoo Answers to ask the world at large about a quote she had heard in a couple of movies and the nice people that had responded had been exasperated with her, but they had also given her a link where she could read _Symposium_. Dean read it, then sat there frowning at the screen for a while. The whole mental image of creatures with two faces and four arms and legs being cut in half by fearful gods did not mesh well with his concept of reality, which yes, was skewed but not quite _that_ skewed. However, he knew a metaphor when he saw one, so he just pushed that aside and focused on the rest. 

He read this: _Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half._ Dean thought of the hollow sensation inside himself, without specific location, but more like a glove over his body, _inside it_ , pulling everything in and distorting it like a black hole at the center of his soul. It tormented him with a sucking sensation like hunger, like _starvation_. Nothing ever made it go away, not his family, not the doctor and her pills, not even the dreams. The pills could sometimes dull the pain, the dreams could make him forget it, but it was still there, driving him mad. 

He read on and paused when he came to, _…the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love,_ and though that wasn’t quite right, it was the best description of it that he had ever come across. Why did he chase these dreams of his? They were nothing but dreams and if he could make them reality, then everything he knew would stop and Dean himself would change and become hard and cold and frightening. But he _couldn’t_ stop. He needed them, he needed Sam to sit with him or look at him or, yes… yes, even _touch_ him. It all hurt less when he had that, and what was that if not love like the love of Plato’s soul mates? 

He didn’t really like the phrase, though. It made him sound like a girl. 

And he still didn’t know what he was supposed to do about any of it.

~~*~~

When he got home from the hospital, the first thing Dean did after hugging his mother was go up to his room, lock the door and unwrap the bandage around his arm to look at it. He expected it to be gross no matter what he had felt when Castiel touched him and even though it didn’t hurt at all anymore, but his arm was just his arm, not a scratch or a scar.

He kept it bandaged as Castiel had suggested but it got to be more like some kind of accessory he put on in the morning or when he got out of the shower and so after a little while, he mostly forgot. He wore long sleeves a lot of the time, so this didn’t matter much, but sometimes he’d catch his mother and father watching him strangely when he put the wrong hand out to pick something up. 

He also kept reading and trying to do research, which wasn’t nearly as easy as one might think. There was a lot of information out there about parallel worlds, realities and dimensions. There was probably just as much if not more out there about angels and soul mates, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of anything about any of it that was worth a damn. For one thing, Dean got the distinct impression from some of the things he read regarding angels that their god would not have approved of Sam being his soul mate one bit and certainly wouldn’t have made it possible to reach through an alternate reality to get to him. 

Dean didn’t have much use for God, but science was no help either. 

By the end of the week, Dean had books in little piles all over his room and notes that appeared random to anyone who cared to look at them taped and tacked all over his walls. His parents were beginning to really worry and more than once his father had brought up his next appointment with Dr. Fraus like Thursday couldn’t come fast enough to suit him. When Dean thought about it, he supposed he might have a slight fixation starting, maybe leaning toward obsession, but he also didn’t think that his reaction was a crazy one considering the situation, thank you very much.

Dean was pretty annoyed with Dr. Fraus so he wasn’t looking forward to Thursday one bit. He hadn’t thrown out his medication like Castiel had suggested he do, but he had stopped taking it. He hadn’t been completely unmedicated for _years_ so it was doing funny things to his head in a big way, but he _needed_ , God, so much he needed to dream again. The problem was, without any of his medication at all, he hadn’t been sleeping much. In fact, not much at _all_. Certainly never long enough to dream. He was having a lot of Bad Days. 

When Thursday came around again, Dean intended to bring all of this up to Dr. Fraus because he had _thought_ she was trying to help him. That was what she always said and he believed her, but now he couldn’t dream and he couldn’t sleep. Both things were taking their toll on the state of his mind in ways that were making it harder for Dean to keep his shit together which in his opinion was a clear sign of _not_ helping. 

Then before he knew it, before he was quite ready, it was Thursday again and Dean was in Dr. Fraus’s office staring at the ugly watercolor painting that looked like a genuine Hitler postcard while she asked him how he felt about Adam coming home that weekend. All the time with her questions about _Adam_. If he didn’t think Dr. Fraus would give him one of those looks of hers over the frames of her glasses Dean might suggest to _her_ that she was developing her own little fixation. 

“Do you think this might have something to do with your uncomfortable feelings about your brother?”

For some reason that caught his attention and Dean lowered his eyes from the picture on the wall to look at the doctor. “What?”

“I was just saying,” Dr. Fraus said, giving Dean one of her scolding looks, “these dreams of yours seem to be sexual in nature, at least as you’ve described them.”

Dean frowned at her, wondering where the hell this was going. He didn’t like the direction at all, that was for sure. “Maybe sometimes,” he said suspiciously. “Why?”

“The man in your dreams is your brother, isn’t he?” Dr. Fraus said. 

“He’s… yeah. That’s what he said,” Dean said. 

Dr. Fraus sighed and shifted in her chair across from him, tapping her pen lightly against her notebook. “Don’t you think it’s odd that you’re having sexual dreams about a man who says that he’s your brother?” she asked. “A man who doesn’t look like your brother at all?”

Actually Dean thought that was probably the least weird thing about it. “What are you trying to _say_? Just say it. I can’t… I can’t _think_ right now, not with you…” He gestured at her and she frowned at him. 

“Dean, _is_ this man Adam?” Dr. Fraus said. 

“Are you fucking serious right now?” Dean snapped before he even thought about it.

“No, no wait, I want you to think about it. Really think, Dean. Is he? Dreams are hard to remember clearly for anyone,” Dr. Fraus said. “It’s not as uncommon as you might think to have such repressed feelings.”

Dean stared down at his hands and picked at a hangnail. “Such repressed feelings like what?” he muttered. 

“I think you know,” Dr. Fraus said. 

Dean suddenly sat forward and stared right into her face. “And I think _you_ are full of shit. Doc-tor _Liar_ , that’s what you are.”

She blinked at him rapidly in surprise. “I… what? Dean, I’m trying to understand what’s happening. I promise you that I have been completely honest with you.”

Dean made a rude grunting sound in his throat and sat back to fumble around in his jacket pocket for the last prescription she had given him. He got his hand around the bottle of pills, yanked it out and shoved it under her nose. “You gave me _these_.”

She jerked back from him warily, then squinted and read the label. “Well yes. I did give you those. They’re to help you sleep without dreaming. Restful sleep, Dean. That’s all.”

“They _made the dreams stop_ ,” Dean fairly snarled at her. 

Dr. Fraus got up from her chair and crossed the room to her desk. “They were supposed to.”

She was putting her desk between herself and Dean. Dean knew what she was doing.

“And _you_ think I want to fuck my _brother_ ,” Dean said. He stood up too, then just stood there and scowled at her. “Maybe you’re sick, Doc, you ever think of that?”

“Dean, I think you need to calm down,” Dr. Fraus said. 

She smiled at him and it was fake. Her lips trembled a little and it didn’t make it to her eyes at all. She looked at him like she was scared of him and Dean could have laughed then because if anyone had any right to be scared right then it was _him_. 

Dean walked over to her desk and Dr. Fraus took a cautious step back from it. Dean looked at her contemptuously and put the orange prescription bottle down on the desk with a sharp clack of hard plastic on wood. “I don’t want them,” Dean said with forced calm. “You keep them.”

She didn’t say anything and Dean wondered as he looked at her if there was a little red button under the edge of her desk to call security when a patient got violent. He thought there might be and he wondered why she hadn’t pushed it. 

Maybe she had. 

“You can stop being afraid of me,” Dean told her. “I’m going to go home now.”

“I’m not _afraid_ of you, Dean, I just--”

“It’s okay. I’d be afraid of me, too,” Dean said tiredly. 

He left then and took the bus home. No one was home when he got there so he just went upstairs and locked himself in his room with his stacks of books and his notes. His completely unhelpful stacks of books, completely irrelevant little notes.

~~*~~

The next day was Friday and Adam came home from the university to visit. This was bad enough, but then he brought someone with him, a _girl_ who hugged Dean without his permission and told him to call her Carrie. He wasn’t sure if that was because it was her name or because it _wasn’t_ her name, she just wanted him to call her that. 

Call Me Carrie was tall for a girl and had curly brown hair, a tan, bright blue eyes and said she was from California. Dean could believe that, she looked like California. She didn’t sound much like California, though, because he always thought of girls that looked like her from California using the word ‘like’ a lot. Usually just as a substitute for pausing between words, not necessarily as an expression of their approval. Call Me Carrie didn’t do that, which was good. Still, Dean wasn’t sure if he liked--as in approved of--her the way Adam clearly wanted for him to. She had hugged him after all. 

“So what do you think of Carrie?” Adam asked him when he got Dean alone just before they left for dinner.

Dean was in the kitchen getting a Coke from the fridge and their parents were in the living room with Carrie. He could hear them talking. “Um. I don’t know. Who is she?”

“She’s…” Adam ran a hand over the back of his neck and looked at Dean with a sheepish little smile. A pleased and embarrassed kind of smile. “She’s sort of my girlfriend.”

Dean raised a brow at that and popped open the top on his Coke. “You’re not sure if she’s your girlfriend?”

“No, no she is,” Adam said. 

“Okay,” Dean said, not sure what was really expected of him. “That’s nice?” he tried. 

“So you do like her?” Adam asked. 

He was really insistent about it and Dean was starting to feel sorry for leaving the relative safety of the living room. He also didn’t understand why the hell it mattered if he liked Carrie or not but it was obvious to him that it did. “Yeah, I like her okay,” Dean said. 

Adam grinned at him, big and pleased and genuine. “Yeah?”

Dean smiled tentatively back at him. “Yeah.”

“Man, I was so _nervous_ , you know?” Adam said, relieved. “I know she’s new and I know you don’t… get along with girls.”

“Or new people,” Dean said, acknowledging that elephant in the room for them both. 

“Yeah,” Adam said, still grinning at him. “So you’re doing better then or what?”

“Depends on who you ask,” Dean said.

This was more or less a brush off that translated to _Not really, but let’s not talk about it._ Adam was a smart kid, he could take a hint. 

“Oh,” Adam said. “Well, it’s good to see you. I’ve missed you.”

Dean snorted and shook his head. “No, you haven’t,” he said. 

He left with his Coke and went upstairs to his room to hide until they made him come out and go to dinner. He knew they needed time to talk about him anyway. Time for their mom and dad to catch Adam up and fill in Call Me Carrie with all the dos and don’ts concerning Dean. 

Dean stretched out on his back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He wanted desperately to take a nap, but he still wasn’t sleeping. He had some pills that could take care of that, sleeping pills and sedatives that he had given up when he went cold turkey on his medication. He thought about taking some, then just lay there without moving to get them. He couldn’t sleep through dinner.

~~*~~

Dean knew that Call Me Carrie had been given the ‘Dean is Crazy’ talk by the way she acted the moment he saw her again. She wouldn’t look him directly in the eye like she was afraid he might be trying to read her mind. When she talked to him, she talked to him like he was a pitiable sort of creature slightly lower on the evolutionary ladder than herself. She kept Adam or one of his parents carefully between herself and Dean at all times and at the restaurant, she sat on the opposite side of the table on the end farthest away from him.

Out of reach, Dean supposed, in case he should completely crack and launch himself over the table at her like a vampire, intent on sinking his teeth into her throat and either devouring her or making her like himself. This mental picture amused him so much that he ran it through his head on repeat while they all talked around him and waited for their waiter.

Dean ordered steak and fries. His parents gave him a stern look as Dean closed his menu. “What?”

“Nothing, dear,” Mary said. Dean could see her move her arm to put a hand on John’s leg. Restraining him, but from what?

Adam leaned over the table toward Dean with a hand over his mouth to hide what he was saying from everyone but Dean. He needn’t have bothered because they could all hear him when he said, “Mom and Dad don’t want you to have the knife.”

Dean narrowed his eyes on Adam and sat back in his chair with his arms crossed. “Then I guess I’ll just have to pick it up with my hands,” he said flatly. He didn’t look at their parents, but he was clearly speaking to them when he said it. 

John started to say something and Mary shushed him with a pat. 

Carrie fidgeted with her napkin and looked painfully embarrassed. 

“Oh, _what_?” Dean said throwing up his hands in exasperation. “I’m not going to carve the girlfriend’s heart out with it, I’m going to eat my food. Jesus Christ.”

“Dean,” John said in warning. 

Carrie got up from the table. “I’m just going to the ladies room. Excuse me.”

Dean watched her go before he turned his gaze back on his family. 

“That was completely unnecessary,” John said, angry and, as always, lost as to what to do about it with him. “We can’t just take Adam and his girl out to dinner without you doing something like that? Come on, Dean, you’re better than that and we all know it.”

“You know what, _that_ was not my fault,” Dean said. “You can make it seem like my fault if you want to, I can’t stop you, but it wasn’t.”

“Dean, please,” Mary said. 

Dean huffed out a heavy sigh. “Fine.”

“He didn’t really _do_ anything,” Adam said, puzzled by the entire situation. 

“ _Thank you_ ,” Dean said. “No, I didn’t. I ordered steak, how the fuck is that bad behavior?”

“We’re in public. Watch the language,” John said. 

“I’m nuts, Dad, not five,” Dean said. He waved a hand in annoyed dismissal at them all when John opened his mouth to argue further. “Fine. I won’t curse.”

“John, just let it go,” Mary said.

John muttered something Dean couldn’t hear and Mary said, “I know,” in that calming way of hers. 

Dean rested his elbow on the table and leaned on his hand, deliberately ignoring them to watch the people in the restaurant. He didn’t really care about people, though, so really he just watched the blur of their colors with out of focus eyes and tried not to feel angry. He thought of Castiel talking to him in the hospital and all of the impossible, strange, frightening, amazing things he had told him, not the least of which was what would have to happen to his family if he chose Castiel’s way. He hadn’t forgotten it and thinking about it made his anger slip away like smoke, making shapes like guilt and grief and regret. 

“Hey, are you okay?” Adam asked him. 

Dean smiled faintly and shook his head. _Not even a little bit_ , he thought. _Not even remotely._ “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m used to it,” he said. 

“You sure?” Adam said. 

“I’m sure,” Dean said. He cast his eyes over to their parents again and noticed them watching the two of them with keen interest. “Now what?”

“Nothing, son,” John said. “It’s just nice to see the two of you getting along.”

 _For a change_ was the implied end of that statement. Before Dean could say anything more about it, Carrie was back from the toilet and Adam hopped up like the proper gentleman he was to pull her chair out for her, which effectively changed the subject to nonsense and dinner appropriate small talk. 

Dean leaned on his arm on the table and ignored them, happy to be ignored in return. He tuned out their conversation so that it was just a rhythm of meaningless voices and watched the restaurant people. People watching was something that he actually enjoyed as long as he could do it from a far enough distance that he wasn’t expected to interact with them or in danger of being touched. Social interaction was something almost completely impossible for him under the best of circumstances, so consequentially Dean found it fascinating. 

People in relationships were especially interesting because Dean had never had one, nor did he particularly ever _want_ one, so it was almost like anthropologic observation of an alien culture. There were people who were married and bored with each other, there were people who were still new to one another and running on the passion of that newness, there were people who were relative strangers to one another, there were people so long in love that functioning independently of one another put them adrift. Dean had seen them all, often from the benches of bus stops in parks or on his way home from Dr. Fraus’s office. 

Mothers with children were of an oddly morbid fascination to Dean. Kids were loud and moody and abrupt, they cried and wet themselves and their noses ran. They leaked everywhere _from_ everywhere and Dean found them thoroughly repulsive but also intensely interesting. 

There weren’t any children in the restaurant. Dean wondered if perhaps they were not allowed.

He was watching a young couple, still in the new and awkward phase of whatever kind of relationship they were in, when he heard his name and picked his head up to look around. It came again and Dean twisted around in his chair to look for the source because it sounded so _strange_ , like someone shouting from far away down a tunnel that echoed. And who _knew_ him anyway? Dean didn’t _know_ people, he didn’t even typically _like_ people, so who?

He looked around the table, quickly counting heads and finding all of his family and Call Me Carrie present and accounted for. “Did you hear something?” he asked them.

He had cut off Adam mid-sentence and everyone stared at Dean curiously for that. “What?” Adam said. “Did you hear something?”

“I don’t… know. Maybe?” Dean said. Carrie made a short little nervous laughing sound and put her hand over her mouth. Dean frowned at her, then turned his attention back to Adam. “I thought I heard someone call my name.”

“Well, honey, maybe there’s another Dean somewhere here,” Mary said.

“I didn’t hear anything,” John said. 

“We were talking, though, so maybe we just didn’t notice,” Mary said. 

“Doesn’t matter,” Dean muttered, relaxing back on his elbow on the table again. They probably thought he was just hearing things because after all, that’s what crazy people did. Dean doubted it but hell, maybe they were right. Maybe it was just part of a daydream, which was actually completely normal and not crazy, but whatever. 

“Are you okay?” Mary asked him when everyone else went back to talking. 

Dean noticed they talked a little more quietly than before, which made him roll his eyes. He had mental problems but it wasn’t like he was going to go Jeffery Dahmer on his family right there at dinner. He was fairly sure his family knew that, too, but they also got nervous bringing him around new and strange people. Most of the time, they were better than this.

“I’m fine,” Dean told his mother. 

“Okay,” she said. 

The waiter brought their food a few minutes later and Dean put the whole thing from his mind. He used a knife on his steak and paid no attention to his family or his brother’s girlfriend. His mother was probably right and there was just some other guy named Dean in the restaurant somewhere. It wasn’t really an uncommon name to have. There was Dean Martin, there was James Dean, Dizzy Dean, Jimmy Dean, there was even a Forest of Dean somewhere in England, so yeah, maybe it hadn’t been his name at all. 

Dean was halfway through his steak before he noticed that they had all relaxed and stopped watching him with those little eye-flicking glances. He was tempted to do what he had told Adam he would do and finish his medium rare steak with his fingers. Instead, he went back to watching people while he ate the rest of his dinner with a knife and fork like a perfectly sane person. 

“So, Dean, what do _you_ do?” Carrie suddenly asked him out of nowhere. 

Dean looked at her and raised an eyebrow at her. He ate a French fry and said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean… what do you do? Do you work or go to school or… what?” she asked. 

And they were all staring at him again and Dean really hated this part about the whole meeting people thing because Call Me Carrie didn’t give a shit what he did, she gave a shit about seeming to give a shit about what he did. It was the politics of relationship building and it won massive brownie points with parents and brothers in most cases. 

“Nope. I go to therapy a lot, though,” Dean said flatly. 

Adam snorted laughter into his napkin. “He works at the shop with our dad,” he said, rescuing Carrie even as he sent Dean an amused look. 

Dean smirked back at him and stabbed a piece of pink, half-cooked beef with his fork. He was fucking tired of playing sane, it was getting him nowhere but annoyed. 

“Oh,” Carrie said faintly. “Well that sounds… nice.”

Dean made a disinterested sound in his throat that neither confirmed or denied this, but conveyed his complete lack of interest in discussing it and chewed his steak, which was excellent. 

“Dean.”

“What?” Dean said automatically. He looked around the table and everyone just stared at him. “What?” Dean repeated. 

“What do you mean, ‘What’?” said Adam. 

Dean frowned at him, then twisted around in his chair to look for someone else, anyone else, that could have said his name. “Someone said my name,” Dean said. He looked back at them all, but they just regarded him with confusion and worry. “Oh, come _on_. I’m not hearing things.”

“No one is saying that you are, honey,” Mary said. 

“Dean! Over here!”

Dean whipped around and his eyes widened when he saw Castiel. Castiel was about ten feet away from their table and as Dean watched, he raised a hand and reached, but his fingers met some invisible resistance. No one looked up from their meals or away from their conversation. No one at all paid any attention to the raggedy man in the trench coat. Dean stumbled up from his chair and started toward him, but Castiel blinked out of existence right before his eyes. 

Dean stumbled to a halt. “Where did he go?” he said, turning around to find his family and Adam’s girlfriend gaping at him. A terrifying possibility occurred to him. “Didn’t you _see_ him?”

John cleared his throat. “Dean, who are you talking about?”

“You didn’t,” Dean said, stunned. “You really didn’t see him.”

“No, son,” John said. “There’s no one there.”

“No, he… he disappeared,” Dean said. He felt dumb even as he said it, knowing that it would only make him seem more and more like a lunatic. 

In the brief second that Dean could see him, Castiel had seemed desperate, his urgency palpable. If he had been trying to cross over again, he had been prevented from it, but even if he had only been reaching out, something had stopped him. Perhaps something as simple and incredible as time moving beyond a certain point, away from a brief span of minutes or hours that allowed for great changes to be made. Perhaps he had been stopped from reaching through just because Dean had failed to choose. 

Or maybe it was all nothing but a figment of his imagination after all. 

Dean sat down heavily in his chair back at the table. His mind was racing and all he could keep thinking over and over was that Castiel had been his proof. Castiel was his evidence to himself and to anyone else that Sam was real and Sam’s where and when were real. Castiel was from that place so it couldn’t just be something Dean was dreaming, it was _real_ because Castiel was real and he was from there. But if Castiel _wasn’t_ real, then everything fell apart. If Castiel wasn’t real, then Sam wasn’t real and Dean was hopelessly in love with a figment of his own psychotic imagination. 

“Dean?”

Dean jumped and jerked his attention to Adam, who had spoken. “What?”

“You alright?” Adam asked. 

Dean stared at him without responding for a minute. Adam reached out instinctively to touch his hand and Dean snatched it out of his reach. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not.”

“Dean, honey?” Mary said. 

Dean glanced at her and he just couldn’t think straight. He was full of misery, confusion and guilt. He was terrified that it was all true and that none of it was real, but he was equally terrified that it was all true and _all_ of it was real. 

“Dean?” Mary said again. 

“Son?” John said when Dean didn’t respond. 

Mary pushed her chair back and stood. “We’re going home,” she said decisively. “John.”

Dean’s father did not protest. He was up from his chair before Mary even said his name and signaled for their waiter so he could pay the check.

“Is something wrong?” Carrie asked. She looked around at everyone getting up from the table with a perplexed frown. She leaned over toward Adam. “Adam, what’s happening?”

Adam stood up as their waiter approached the table and shook his head. “Nothing,” he said absently to Carrie. “We’re leaving. Come on, get your purse.”

“We can’t leave,” Carrie said. “It’s still early. I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Adam said again. He pulled her chair out for her and Carrie grabbed her purse and stood up reluctantly from the table. Adam put his arm around her waist and led her out of the restaurant.

Dean watched them go with dazed disinterest until his father stepped into his line of sight. Remembering John’s resentment and impatience from earlier, expecting him to be angry, Dean’s eyes flinched away from his face and he would not look at him. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. 

“Dean, stop that,” John said. He did not sound angry, just a little anxious. “We’re going home now. Come on, let’s not make a scene. Your mother’s waiting.”

“Dad,” Dean said. He swallowed and felt it click in his throat. He wanted to cry and realized that he was close to doing so if he didn’t pull it together. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, son,” John said. “It’s okay. It’s all okay. Let’s just go now.”

That wasn’t exactly what he had meant, but how did Dean explain what had happened to people who could not see it? To people who would dismiss what he was going through as delusions? How did he tell his father what the stakes were and the decision he had made already in his heart?

Dean nodded, took a deep breath and stood up from the table. “Okay,” he said. “Dad?”

John fell into step beside him. “Yeah?”

Dean could see his mother waiting by the door with her clutch purse in her hands. “Dad, will you tell Mom?” Dean asked softly. “That I’m sorry? Please?”

“Sure, Dean,” John said. “But you can tell her yourself.”

They were close enough to his mother now that she could hear them so Dean lowered his voice. “Maybe,” he mumbled. “Maybe I will.”

~~*~~

While everyone else went into the living room to watch a movie that night, Dean sat at the table in the backyard alone. He listened to the crickets in the grass and lined up the little orange bottles of all the pills he had not been taking on the tabletop in front of him. He had a tall glass of milk in his hand and he knew what it was for even if he didn’t know how he knew it. Even if he kept telling himself as he took the glass from the cupboard and filled it that he wasn’t really doing what he was doing. 

But he _was_ doing it. 

Dean opened a bottle and tapped the pills out onto the glass top of the table. He looked at them, orange in the light over the porch, and he counted them. There were ten. Dean opened another bottle and repeated the process. Round white pills. Twelve of them. The next bottle held little triangular shaped black pills. The next one had green ones. Then pink ones. Lipstick red ones. He emptied the bottles one by one, grouped the pills into little piles and counted them all. There were tranquilizers, antipsychotics and sleeping pills. There was also a bottle of very strong pain medication that had been prescribed to him when he hurt himself at work. He had never taken them because Castiel had healed his arm. 

Very faintly from inside the house, something on the TV exploded. Dean smiled tiredly and took a drink of milk. He followed the milk immediately with the pain pills. He took them three at a time with milk to coat his stomach and listened to the blending sounds of crickets chirping and the soundtrack of the movie playing in the living room. He finished the pain pills and let his head drop back with a sigh against the back of his chair. 

The stars were brighter than he could remember them ever being. Across the yard, Dean could just make out the skeleton of the tree house his father had built for him when he was little. It was the same tree house that Adam had played in. When they were children, Adam had looked up to Dean as his big brother and sometimes Dean would camp out with him in that tree house. They made up ghost stories that weren’t very scary. That was before he went crazy. After that, Adam mostly avoided him because the things Dean said hurt his feelings and frightened him. 

Dean took another sip of his milk and began taking the rest of his pills, starting with the Thorazine. He had to take them all quickly or it was going to hurt. The longer it took for him to take them, the longer it would take for him to die and the milk would help keep him from vomiting, but as his body tried to reject the chemicals he was putting into it, he might start to convulse. He could even slip into a coma. Either one of these would mean he had failed and more than ever now, he couldn’t afford to do that. 

Dean took the pills by type and had finished most of the tranquilizers before he started to feel anything. He could feel his heart racing and his breath coming harder as his lungs relaxed along with his muscles. The thing about most sedatives was that they were also prescribed to prevent vomiting, so combined with the milk, it was pretty unlikely that he was going to throw it all up. Everything just went still, there was very little nausea, but he wondered if it still might hurt. He only wondered about that for a little while before his mind wandered and he spent several seconds staring at the collapsing tree house in the shadows just outside of the porch light before he shook his head and forced himself to focus. He couldn’t stop now. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stop now unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life as a vegetable, curled into a fetal position with his muscles being exercised by electric pulses, his food fed to him in tasteless calories directly to his stomach through a tube. 

Another handful of pills. There was a strange numb, almost padded feeling to his skin and Dean felt feverishly hot. It wasn’t uncomfortable really, but his heart was beating so rapidly that it made his throat tickle from the vibration. Dean reached for more pills, but the muscles in his hands and arms were twitching and cramping. He couldn’t hold them and the capsules rattled against the glass tabletop like the pebbles in a maraca as they spilled over it and went everywhere.

Weak and completely lax, Dean slumped back in his chair and let his head fall back again. He stared at the stars, which were still bright and beautiful, though his eyes didn’t want to focus and the sky would sometimes spin in his vision. They were a swirling blur then, but still pretty. 

Stomach cramps made Dean’s abdomen contract and he gritted his teeth against any involuntary noise that might bring his parents or Adam outside to ‘save’ him. In that moment, he regretted that he had not done everything his research had told him to do and also brought a plastic bag with him outside to use in those last minutes. What he read said that it was like drifting peacefully to sleep then, that it was tranquil and soothing to suffocate. Dean had found the concept of such peace and ease during death deeply disturbing, but now he wondered if it might have been easier that way. However, more than that, he regretted that he had not told his mother how sorry he was. Even if she wouldn’t understand why, he had wanted to tell her how sorry he was for the choice that he was making. It made him extremely grateful that his choice would mean that Mary would never walk outside onto the porch and find him dead at the table. 

No one else could see Castiel or hear him. No one had seen the way Jolene’s face twisted but him. No one knew that there were other wheres and whens out there or that they were almost so close that you could touch them. No one else knew that Sam was a real person and not a delusion of his fucked up mind. No one knew these things, but that didn’t matter. Dean wore a bandage on his arm to cover a wound that was not there because Castiel, who was very real, had healed it with a touch. That was the _only_ thing that mattered now. The stars, the pills, the tree house and that. 

Dean swallowed. He felt how dry his mouth was and coughed weakly. This dying shit, he decided, was for the birds. It could hurry up and get over with any goddamn time now. 

“Dean.”

Dean stared up at the sky and watched the stars. He wondered if they would change. Were the stars in the other world, Dean’s dream world, Castiel’s river world, the same stars that shined in his eyes now? 

“Dean.”

Dean tried to pick up his head and found that he couldn’t. “Be quiet,” he said. His voice was a dry croak and it hurt his throat to talk. 

“Dean.”

Dean sighed and it seemed like it took forever. Castiel’s voice in his ear was like a nail in his brain right behind his left eye. “I’m coming,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

And he was going, but he wasn’t going for Castiel. It was Sam he wanted, but it wasn’t Sam’s voice calling him home. Dean closed his eyes and let himself feel his body all around him dying, thinking that if Castiel would just shut up and let him do it, he could get there. It didn’t happen all at once and there was no bright light at the end of any tunnel. There was a sensation like drifting in the darkness behind his shut eyelids that may have lasted for eons but probably only lasted less than a minute. Then he must have died because it was like being pushed on a great ocean wave. It was like being forced from the world on the current of its breaking. It came apart and Dean was forced from it like a pebble from a slingshot. 

He opened his eyes and he was laying on his back in the grass. The stars above him were the same stars in all the right places. The grass tickled and scratched against the flesh of his bare arms the same as any grass ever had. There were still crickets rubbing their wings together somewhere in the weeds not far away, playing their strange mating song. He looked around at the night landscape and though he didn’t know precisely where he was or what was going on in the here and now, he wasn’t afraid. The hole where Sam had not been all his life was full. The wind didn’t blow there anymore. There was another pain, similar to that but not nearly as wide, that hurt somewhere between his chest and his abdomen when he thought of his parents’ faces. It took the place of that hole, reminding Dean of the great price he had paid.

“Sam?” Dean said, calling tentatively. 

There was no reply for what felt like a long time. Then off to Dean’s left, there came the crunch of boots on gravel and he looked up to see Sam, who was just a tall shadow in the dark, approaching. The highway was somewhere behind them and a car with its high beams on passed, the lights illuminating Sam just enough that Dean could make out his features and knew that he was faintly smiling. 

“Dean?” Sam said. He sat down in the grass beside him and folded his arms around his knees. “Are you alright now?”

Dean thought about it, then he sat up and looked around. They were parked off the road in the grass beside a truck off-ramp rest area. He recognized the Impala, though Dean knew he had never seen the car or driven it. He had memories of driving that car, of working on it, of _crashing_ it. He had played in that car with Sam when they were little and their father had taught them both to drive in it long before they had legal permits. 

“Cas left a few minutes ago, so I thought…” Sam trailed off and frown lines appeared between his eyebrows as he looked at Dean. “You are alright, huh?”

“What?” Dean said. He drew his attention away from the car and the road beyond it and the stars beyond that and stared at Sam blankly. 

He remembered a puff from a cotton tree caught in Sam’s hair, which was golden from the sunlight and there was no one there in his mind now to stop him from remembering how he had kissed Sam the first time when Sam was barely sixteen there on the hood of the Impala. Somewhere, trying to creep into those memories was something about angels and demons and the end of the world, but Dean pushed that aside and remembered how the book Sam was reading then slipped from his lap and bounced off the bumper of the car to land by Dean’s feet in the dirt. A few years later, those books would take Sam away from him all the way to California and Stanford where he met and loved a girl named Jess for a little while. That memory hurt and Dean knew it hurt for all the wrong reasons, but he didn’t care. It didn’t really matter now, though, because Stanford didn’t last and Sam was there beside him now. Even the memories that hurt him felt _right_ anyway.

“Did he say anything?” Dean said. 

Sam blinked at him. “Who?”

“Cas,” Dean said. “Did he say… I don’t know. Anything?”

“Not really,” Sam said. “He said it was fixed now. You know, the whole time thing?”

Sam didn’t sound like he actually knew what exactly ‘the time thing’ was.

Dean smiled at him and resisted the urge to reach out and touch him. He _really_ wanted to touch him. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it is.”

“Okay,” Sam said. 

“Did he say I’ll be different?” Dean asked. 

“He didn’t say much, actually,” Sam said. 

“But you know anyway,” Dean guessed. 

“Yeah. I think so,” Sam said. “You’ve been acting pretty… weird.”

“Weird for me,” Dean said. 

“Weird for you is pretty fucking weird,” Sam agreed. 

“Yeah,” Dean said. 

Dean rested his head against Sam’s shoulder and felt Sam’s surprise. It made him smile because he knew _that_ was different. Maybe it wouldn’t last, but maybe it would. Maybe loving Sam would be easier or maybe in time he would forget and take it for granted again. Maybe he would sometimes be afraid, but he would be afraid for different reasons now. That was okay because even if he was sometimes afraid, he wouldn’t be lonely. He might be crazy even here, but it was an insanity he had earned, not one he was stamped with and Dean thought he could live with that. He was in this strange new world and it already felt natural. It felt like he had only been dreaming and had awakened on the side of the road in the grass beside Sam. 

“God, I want a cigarette,” Dean said abruptly. He got up from the ground and pulled at Sam’s shirtsleeve before going around the hood of the car. The keys were in his pocket and he flipped them on his finger by the ring. “Come on, Sammy. Let’s go find a Texaco or something. Hey, maybe they’ll have snacky cakes. I’m starving.”

Sam rolled his eyes and got up. Dean couldn’t see him roll his eyes in the dark, but he still knew he was doing it. He gave Sam an unrepentant grin over the roof of the Impala, then got in and started it. Black Sabbath blasted from the radio speakers and Sam groaned, then turned it down. Dean instantly reached over and turned it back up.

**XXX**


End file.
